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

A Second Look at the Second Crouch: Ambiguity in J.K. Rowling's Villains

Though I am in the habit of rereading the Harry Potter series regularly, most especially the second, third, and fifth books, I had not read the fourth book in a long time when I picked it up recently.  Personally, I consider the fourth to be the weakest book of the entire series; I find the Triwizard Tournament plot to be boring, unrelatable, and far-fetched.  As Ron says, everything happens to Harry, and this particular instance of that being true stretched the limits of my believability a bit too far, in addition to which I never quite understood why Harry was trying so hard to win anyway; he didn’t need the money, knew he had a long shot at being able to compete at all, and didn’t even want to be there in the first place.  Sure, he had strong motivation not to get eaten by the dragon in the first task, but he really should have just given up at some point before he did in the second task and just asked for the judges to return whatever was taken, especially since he thought it was an object he was looking for before he actually saw Ron under the water.  The same is true of the third task: it’s understandable that Harry would want to learn defensive spells, but once he’s actually inside the maze it would be smartest for him to just stay put in an area he can defend well and hope that someone else finds the cup quickly. 

However, all that aside, one aspect of the fourth book that I appreciated more this time around was the character of Barty Crouch Jr.  I almost entirely missed his presence the last time I read the book—mostly because though I knew he wasn’t the real Moody I couldn’t help but think of him that way—and this time around, I found him fascinating in his many-layered ambiguity, and the subtle but fascinating contradictions that J.K. Rowling creates in his character.  After closing the fourth book, having realized that this was true, I immediately went running for the internet, assuming that Junior (as he’s so nicknamed) would be just as thoroughly dissected as any of Rowling’s other delightfully ambiguous characters: there are entire websites and books devoted to the issue of Snape’s loyalties, and nearly that much material about Dumbledore; even the seemingly straightforward Peter Pettigrew is the source of much debate… And yet, there is almost nothing out there trying to figure out the problems that Junior presents for readers, problems that are never fully resolved. 

On the surface, J.K. Rowling plays one of her classic ploys in getting us to think one thing about a character only to learn another.  The first mention of Crouch Jr. comes when Sirius is talking about Azkaban; his account of hearing the boy cry for his parents before he “fell silent in the end… except when [he] screamed in his sleep,” is absolutely chilling.  In light of Sirius’s assessment about Crouch Sr., it seems pretty clear that Junior only ended up in Azkaban because his father didn’t want to be associated with anyone who had ever had anything to do with accusations of Death Eater activity, regardless of guilt or innocence.  The first time we see Crouch Jr. as himself, he is about to be handed over to the dementors by his apathetic father; he is portrayed as a pathetic and sympathetic figure, in contrast to the coldly unapologetic Lestranges.  Even as Harry is watching the almost angelic-seeming figure of the boy barely older than himself with blonde hair and childlike freckles, we are reminded that he died less than a year later.  Although Rowling never provides any proof one way or another, and in fact never has Harry reach a definitive conclusion, it is largely assumed from this sequence that Crouch Jr. is innocent, that like Sirius he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that he died a terrible death to preserve his father’s reputation.  Crouch Sr. is unquestionably heartless at that point, and Crouch Jr. is, like Sirius, a victim of his father’s coldness.

“Moody,” like Crouch Jr., seems a pretty clear-cut character as well.  Although again nothing is ever definitively stated about his personality, we see that he is an effective teacher that uses his field experience to his advantage when giving his students instruction in how to protect themselves.  He takes personal time to get to know each of his students, as shown through his talking alone with both Neville and Harry, and he is familiar with the backgrounds and personalities of the people he teaches.  Harry stops short of calling “Moody” a better teacher than Lupin was, but he does not hesitate to heap praise on “Moody’s” teaching abilities.  One really gets the sense that the students learn a lot about defense and protection from “Moody’s” classes; even if he seems a little gruff sometimes, a lot of what he is teaching is sound principles, and plus, Dumbledore trusts him, and if you can’t trust Dumbledore you can’t trust anyone… Right? 

Then comes the end of Goblet of Fire.  All is revealed, the masks come off, and suddenly everything that happened earlier on.  It is only in rereading the fourth book that it becomes apparent that all is not quite what it seems.  Was Crouch Jr. really in the wrong place at the wrong time when he was initially convicted, and it was only after he went crazy in Azkaban that he joined Lord Voldemort?  Was he really just a victim of politics who chose to follow Voldemort to escape his abusive father?  When, exactly, did Crouch Jr. become a Death Eater—before what happened to the Longbottoms, or only after when he was confronted with the choice of joining or refusing the Dark Lord himself?  Why did “Moody” teach the students so well, going so far as to teach Harry an ability (throwing off the Imperius) that later helped him escape Voldemort, and comforting Neville after class though he is the reason Neville is so disturbed by the Cruciartus Curse in the first place?  Wouldn’t it have been easier just to play to everyone’s expectations and pass himself off as slightly insane?  How does Crouch Sr. really feel about his son?  Most importantly, perhaps, what does J.K. Rowling want us to think about the character?

Interestingly, no one I’ve ever encountered has ever made all that much attempt to resolve these problems with the enigma that is Crouch Jr.  Most people just go the route of assuming that he is absolutely evil and that is the end of the story.  Though there are a small handful of people that pay more attention to Crouch Sr., even he gets ignored a lot, despite the fascinating mystery presented by both Barty Crouches. 

Now, understand that this is the place where I enter the land of speculation and half-baked theory and I may just be farting out cheese cauldrons or whatever Dumbledore’s saying is, BUT… I don’t necessarily think that Crouch Jr. is supposed to be a villain, so much as a victim of circumstance. 

The rather convenient device of veritaserum allows us to take everything that Jr. says in his final confession as absolute truth.  Therefore, I wanted to comment on a few things he did say rather than the things that he did not.  For instance, Jr. starts his story by explaining how he got out of Azkaban—not how he got in there.  He does not confess to the torturing of Alice and Frank Longbottom, even though he has no reason not to, and he does not say that he was actually a Death Eater before he was put in prison.  Could it be that Harry’s (and Sirirus’s) and our initial impressions were correct, and Jr. really was only handed over to the dementors to keep Daddy’s reputation intact?  After getting out of prison, of course Jr. did several things that were thoroughly evil, including setting up Cedric Diggory to be killed and using unforgivable curses on the Triwizard champions, but all of that was only after he had spent almost a year in a place that, by all accounts of anyone worth listening to, makes even the nicest people crazy.  So, in my opinion, that leaves us open to the possibility that Jr. wasn’t an evil person until he spent all that time sitting around reliving his absolute worst memories while being driven slowly insane, on top of being told by everyone up to and including his own parents that he was worth less than dirt… Well, it’d be enough to turn anyone into a Death Eater, to say the least.  (Except Sirius Black, of course, but even he is hardly a paradigm of rational sanity by the time he escapes.)

Even so, Jr. never says that he was a Death Eater.  He never says he was evil at all, and he never confesses to doing anything more than being a little nutty (again, we wonder why)… until Voldemort himself popped up at the Crouches’ front door.  Now, it is one thing to be a part of the yay-Voldy parade from the distance, as Peter Pettigrew proves, and it is another thing entirely to be willing to kill or die for his cause.  The choice between one and the other is pretty much taken away when an admittedly casual follower is suddenly confronted by the man himself, in the not-quite flesh.  What might very well have been teenage rebellion up until that point (again, speculation here) was rapidly forced into the land of with-us-or-against-us.  All of a sudden Jr. was being asked to give up his identity and possibly his life to serve Voldemort.  Quite a different kettle of fish for a man who was (unlike the Lestranges) not willing to do to prison for the cause a decade before.  And yet he goes along, whether out of fear for his life or desire to escape his father.

And then there is the issue of Crouch Sr.  Again, the strong initial impression is negative: we see him punishing Winky for what is apparently a tiny infraction with excessive force, and then learn from Sirius that he is a ruthless self-serving bureaucrat that doesn’t let minutiae like family bonds or human emotions to get in the way of his career.  Later after his death we start to feel some pity for him, and realize that there was (of course) more going on in the scene with Winky than there initially seemed to be… And yet, several troubling details remain.  Most specifically, there is the fact that not only is this man responsible for the destruction of Sirius Black’s entire life while Peter Pettigrew walked free and was eventually able to bring back Voldemort, but this man kept his own son locked inside under the Imperious Curse for almost a decade.  Maybe Crouch Sr. risked everything (and gave up his wife) to get Crouch Jr. out of prison, but what was waiting for Jr. on the other side doesn’t sound as though it was much better.  Again, it appears that, ironically, the apparently false initial impression of the character might not have been so false after all: Crouch Jr. was entirely the victim of Crouch Sr.’s ruthlessness and lack of feeling, just not in the way that many people thought.

It casts a new light on the only murder that Jr. ever admits to.  Perhaps Crouch Jr. wasn’t just exercising ruthlessness to get an unneeded person out of the way (seems to run in the family) when he killed his father.  Perhaps Crouch Sr.’s killing was an act of justice by his most damaged victim.  After all, if it had been, say, Sirius who had killed Crouch Sr., the reader might not have automatically exonerated him from all blame, but at least would have been sympathetic and admitted that the man had it coming.  All things considered, Jr. had a lot more justifiable reason to off Daddy Dearest than even Sirius did.  So why should that be considered a sign of his being evil?  Isn’t that a sign that he is, terrifyingly, human? 

So, when offered the chance to escape his abusive home life, and given the alternative of being killed instead, Jr. chose to follow Voldemort and get him back into power.  Not much of a choice at all, as a matter of fact.  Jr. went with Pettigrew, captured Moody, impersonated him… And then went on to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts to a whole bunch of young future aurors.  If Crouch Jr. really was the soul of evil that everyone makes him out to be, then why go through the trouble of creating effective lesson plans and impressing on everyone so well the ideas that later helped them?  Jr. could easily play up Moody’s apparent madness or even the fact that an ex-auror has probably never taught a thing in his life before, used any number of excuses to get away with teaching the students the bare minimum, or even nothing at all, or even misdirection.  After all, Lockhart and Quirrell already got away with doing that exact thing, and for some reason no mid-semester review ever looked too hard at either of them.  So why on earth would he bother to teach his students so many spells and techniques that they later used to defend themselves—against Death Eaters?  Voldemort’s plan might have succeeded if not for the fact that Harry had been trained in how to throw off the Imperious Curse by Crouch Jr. himself. 

Significantly, this is the only lesson that we ever see in detail: the one where Jr. demonstrates that he has no problems casting the Unforgivable Curses—on spiders.  And that, even if he feigns compassion for the child of his victims (or were they?) he nonetheless succeeds in cheering up and even befriending Neville Longbottom.  Another place where a half-hearted effort or even no effort at all would have slid under the radar without commentary from anyone, and yet he went the extra mile to be a good teacher.  Why?  Could it be that he actually feels bad for what happened to the Longbottoms?  Could that have to do with the fact that he was a bystander and not a perpetrator?  However, it is the Imperious Curse that Jr. uses on his students, and the Imperious Curse that he teaches at least Harry to throw off.  The exact same curse that was used on Jr. himself for all those years.  It could very well be that his motivation here is not any grand plan for Voldemort’s rise or Harry’s downfall, but rather a simple, very human, desire not to see anyone else used the way that he was. 

The rest of Jr.’s story remains something of a mystery, because he never gets the chance to make any further confessions.  Very literally, the government comes swooping in to suck out his soul.  This is the final act of destruction from the alleged “good guys” that brings about the end of a boy caught in the middle of an intensely personal war.  Anything further that Jr. might have been able to tell readers is lost to the ages, because he has nothing more that can be said.  Thus this respected family comes to the same ugly end as many of the other respected families in the novels: all its members either dead or worse than. 

Crouch Jr.’s eventual fate supports the idea that our ultimate feelings about the character are supposed to be somewhat ambiguous.  Though the idea of the dementor’s kiss is referenced repeatedly in the last five books, and is generally agreed on by characters and readers alike to be one of the most terrifying fates imaginable, Crouch Jr. is, significantly, the only character that we ever actually see receive this punishment.  Harry has been questioning the policies of the Ministry of Magic more or less since the second book, and this presents one of the biggest and stickiest conundrums of the whole series: does anyone actually, really deserve what the dementors do to a person?  The first mention of the dementor’s kiss is in the third book, when Professor Lupin explains to Harry what is under a dementor’s hood; when he points out that this is what will happen to Sirius if he is caught, Harry’s immediate response is that he deserves it.  Lupin questions whether this is so, and as it turns out he is right to do so, because of course Sirius has never done anything to merit having his soul sucked out, and yet no one would have ever known this if Sirius had been apprehended and punished as the law dictated.  Even when it is revealed that the true perpetrator is Peter Pettigrew, the question of the dementor’s kiss is not resolved, because Pettigrew is a weak, pitiful villain to Black’s menacing mastermind figure, and Harry considers it to be “not worth it” to kill Pettigrew. 

Peter Pettigrew even dies saving the life of the boy he twice set up to be killed, in the seventh book.  That would not have been possible if he had been punished as he allegedly deserved, with insanity in Azkaban or soullessness after the kiss; he would have had no chance at redemption.  So if the man who killed two of his closest friends and twelve bystanders and condemned another friend to a lifetime in Hell doesn’t deserve the dementor’s kiss or a life sentence in Azkaban…  Who does?  Bellatrix Lestrange would seem to be the obvious candidate for this; Dante would probably appreciate the idea of punishing a the people who tortured Aurors into insanity with a lifetime of being tortured into insanity, and yet Harry’s initial reaction upon seeing Bellatrix in person for the first time is that she is almost as “ravaged” by Azkaban as Sirius is.  It is interesting to note the use of the word “ravaged;” it is used in the fifth book to describe the effects of dementors on both Sirius and Bellatrix and in the seventh book to describe Lucius Malfoy after only a few months in Azkaban; the word suggests that a violation, some sort of desecrating act, has occurred, and the victims of this still bear the damages.  Characters in the whole series—at least, sympathetic characters—all seem to have the same reaction to dementors, one of disgust.   

I surprised myself with the number of times that I mentioned Sirius Black when writing this little blurt, and I think that that fact deserves mentioning.  Maybe it’s just more wild conjecture on my part, but I now wonder whether Jr. is intended to be a parallel for Sirius.  Both are victims of Crouch Sr.’s ruthlessness, both are admittedly imbalanced by their time in Azkaban, and before the fifth book they were the only two people ever known to have escaped the dementors once sentenced there.  All that, taken in light of the fact that Sirius didn’t commit the crime he was imprisoned for, but was rather in the wrong place at the wrong time and was never given a change to explain himself… I’d say it lends some weight to the theory that the Lestranges acted alone in what they did to the Longbottoms, and Jr. was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The other person that I think Jr. may parallel is Harry himself.  There are no shortage of characters that come from less-than-loving homes in the novels; one need only look at the parallels between Harry and Sirius to find this (sometime I’ll have to create another blog post about the extent to which Harry is more Sirius’s heir, and to a lesser extent Remus’s, than he ever will be James’s…).  Nonetheless, the specific language used in the books reinforces his parallel.  When Harry witnesses Jr.’s trial, he describes Jr. as “a boy a few years older than himself,” showing that Harry feels a connection to this boy.  Later, in the fifth book, Harry thinks back to Jr.’s trial during his own hearing for misuse of magic.  Jr., like Voldemort, is a sort of warning tale for Harry: he was raised in an unloving home, and he responded by becoming every bit as bad as the people who raised him, whereas Harry overcomes his upbringing to become a loving person. 

I can’t say for sure whether J.K. Rowling intended Crouch Jr. to be a sadistically evil murderer or an innocent victim of circumstance.  One aspect of her novels that is so fascinating is the fact that they are filled with riddles and ambiguities that will leave scholars (and bloggers) scratching their heads for years to come.  That said, I want to be the first one to throw this idea out there because to my surprise no one else has done it yet: I do think that this particular ambiguity is entirely deliberate, and that the possibility, no matter how slim, that Jr. was innocent is intended to reinforce the theme that runs throughout the books: that the innocent are always the first victims of war.  Harry has to find the balance within his character between his desire to prove himself to the world and seek revenge against the man who destroyed his life and his desire to be a good kid who just wants to get by in the world.  I propose that both Barty Crouches lost their innocence to the war, but that though their crimes are heinous, they were victims before they were ever perpetrators.  Crouch Jr. especially is supposed to be a sacrifice of war: first his sanity, then his innocence, and finally his soul were stripped away by the government that in some regards became no better than that which it was fighting. 

Bug

Harry Potter: What's Up With the Ending?

SPOILERS. OBVIOUSLY.

By the time I reached the epilogue of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I was so emotionally wrung out that Harry and the gang could have joined Monty Python's Flying Circus and I wouldn't have noticed. The only part that caught my attention was the last line, because JKR had announced years ago that the last word of the last book would be 'scar,' but later modified that statement and said that the last sentence would contain the word 'scar.' Sure enough, it did (Okay, it was the second to last line, but still), and I liked the last line. I thought it was a subtle way of informing the readers that the darkness was more or less gone from Harry's life, and that the great pain/weight that had dogged him for his entire childhood had finally dissipated.

Upon rereading, however, the ending made me vaguely uneasy, and it wasn't until I heard other peoples' responses that I figured out why. This is my attempt to dissect the ending and understand my own and others' feelings about the final chapter in the Harry Potter Saga.

I think it's important to start out this dissection by acknowledging that JKR is the lord, master, and yes, god of the Harry Potter world, and therefore she can do whatever the heck she wants. While I don't always agree with authors' decisions (Ron and Hermione being a good example...no offense to them or their fans, I just can't see them as a couple) I do acknowledge that it is their world, and therefore they get to call the shots, while I should just consider myself privileged to read their stories. So, JKR was perfectly within her right to end the Harry Potter series the way she did, and I trust that she wrote the ending that felt right to her.

To understand why I felt uneasy with the ending, I thought about some of my favorite endings to series/books and tried to find the common threads. The three I picked were Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, K.A Applegate's Animorphs, and Avi's The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. (SPOILERS! OBVIOUSLY!)


His Dark Materials ends with Lyra and Will returning to their own worlds, with the assumption that they won't see each other again until they die. They're making a great sacrifice in order to repair the universe and save humanity's souls, and while they know it's the right thing to do, it doesn't mean that their hearts are any less broken. Still, they understand that this is the only option, and so they both resolve to live their lives, visiting the same bench in the Botanical Gardens in Oxford at the same time, so they stay connected. As expressed in The Amber Spyglass, they must both "build their own Republic of Heaven." The ending is sad, but it's also hopeful, because it implies that they are both going to design their own fates.


Animorphs ends with Jake, Marco, and Tobias on a likely suicidal mission to rescue Ax. Rachel is dead, and Cassie is living out her life on Earth. A lot of people dislike this ending, both because it's a cliffhanger and because many people see it as an implication that the Animorphs would rather go out fighting than try to live normal lives. However--which of the Animorphs' missions wasn't suicidal? As Marco was so fond of pointing out, everything they did was "insane." I don't think that K.A Applegate was killing her characters, I think she was sending them off on their next grand adventure. And as for Cassie not coming along, another sticking point for many fans, I think it was because Cassie was already involved in another adventure--saving the planet. Again. The Animorphs ending worked for me, because  to me anyways it implied that the Animorphs would carry on forever doing the same thing they'd always done--be heroes

Finally, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle ends with Charlotte running away from her family and rejoining the crew of the Seahawk before they set sail. It doesn't say if she actually sailed off with them, or if her family caught up with her--it just ends with her climbing on deck. And this more than anything epitomizes the two main reasons why I didn't care for (There. I said it. I didn't like the end, okay?) the end of the Harry Potter series.


All three of those endings I picked have three things in common, three things that I think were missing from the end of Deathly Hallows. First, in all three endings the characters are neither entirely happy nor entirely sad. Second, in all three endings the characters are doing what they love, or at least what they believe to be the right thing. Third, and perhaps most important of all, all three stories end ambiguously.

My first issue with the ending of Deathly Hallows is that everyone seems so ridiculously happy. This is only a moment in their lives, lives that logically are varied and complex, but especially coming right after the Battle for Hogwarts, it was too much sugar too soon. Everyone, from Harry to Malfoy to Teddy Lupin to Ron and Hermione, seems content and happy. It's as if all their problems ended with Voldemort's death, after which point they all lived peaceful, normal lives. Again, obviously this isn't entirely the case, but we don't get anything but that one scene, and that scene makes it seem like their lives are all butterflies and daisies.

My second issue was closely tied to my first issue, and it was that all the main characters seemed to have cookie-cutter lives. A lot of this was confirmed in JKR's post-Potter interviews, but even in those few pages it seemed that all the main characters were happily married, with relatively stable, normal lives. Ginny as a mom seemed particularly weird to me, although quite frankly all of them as parents was just odd. Again, not blaming JKR--it just didn't work for me. It's a logical progression of their lives, but up until those last 2,000-odd words the only way I'd seen those characters was struggling to defeat evil, going on grand adventures, and fighting awesome battles against the mystical creatures and the powers of darkness. The image of them all as parents sending their 2.5 kids off to school was jarring and bizarre for me. And even knowing that they were all doing things they enjoyed, it all seemed a little too...nice, for lack of a better word. Didn't they ever get the urge to battle a dragon? To sneak into a secret government building? To solve a magical riddle? And again, maybe they did, but we don't get to see it.

If I could change just one thing about the ending, it would have been to leave the kids out. If we'd jumped five years into the future and seen them all chatting, or doing laundry, or juggling fireballs, and Hermione and/or Ginny was pregnant, that would have been fine. But seeing them as parents, with school-aged children, didn't work for me in the least. I recently read a Robert B. Parker book (he's a phenomenal mystery writer whom I can't recommend strongly enough) where two characters have a long discussion about how people change over time, despite what we want to believe. And one of the greatest catalysts for change in a person's life is becoming a parent. The children's presence took me away from the tightly woven world of Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived, and his school mates, friends and enemies alike, whom I'd been following for the past decade, and dragged me out into the wider but more mundane adult world.

Like it or not, the Harry, Ron, and Hermione we see at the end of Deathly Hallows are not the same people we've been following for the whole series. Among other things, their having children fundamentally changed who they are, and that's the crux of my discomfort with the epilogue: I felt like the series didn't end with the characters I'd grown to know and love, but with a bunch of charming strangers.

Minutiae (Or other little random thoughts that didn't fit in the body of this post):

*Part of me wonders if JKR called it an epilogue specifically because she didn't want it to be thought of as part of the HP series, but as a charming add-on to satisfy readers' curiosity and give her a chance to make her characters happy. I wonder if she wanted readers to consider the denouement following the battle the final scene of the HP series.

*I don't know how I feel about Harry calling his son Albus Severus. Others have mocked the nuttiness of that name, but what bothered me was the Severus part. To me, it was very clear in "The Prince's Tale" that Snape was entirely motivated out of his love for Lily Evans--not Lily Potter. Snape felt no affection for Harry, and any protectiveness towards him was born out of guilt over Lily's death. Snape was not a saint--far from it, in fact--and his love was tainted with possessiveness and bitterness. It's telling that Snape is unable to see Dumbledore's point, that Harry is far more like Lily than like James, when it was fairly obvious to the reader from midway through the fifth book that Harry was his mother's son. The fact that Snape never saw, never even tried to see, beyond the surface shows that he's just as petty and prejudiced as we've believed him to be throughout the whole series...and Harry knows all of that. I get that he comes to see Snape as a person instead of the enemy, but giving his son Snape's name seems a bit much to me. I don't care what else Snape did--as Sirius says, the true measure of a man is how he treats those he holds power over, and as evidenced again and again throughout the books, Snape fails that test miserably. Just look at his treatment of Neville if you don't believe me.

*Speaking of naming issues, Rose and...Hugo? Sorry. It's a little thing, and not important, but those names so don't work for me. I was also sort of disappointed that Ron and Hermione's son wasn't named Fred, but I guess I'll just assume that they left that name to George and Angelina.

*Another naming issue: (And I can already hear Bug yelling at me for my obsession with names...what can I say? I find them fascinating.) I didn't like that James Potter (grandson) seemed just like James Potter (grandfather). I hate it in stories when a character carries another (usually dead) character's name, and then they end up bearing a strong resemblance to the person whose name they carry. (For instance, Anakin Solo to Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars Extended Universe, and Thom, Alanna and George's son, to Thom, Alanna's brother, in Tamora Pierce's Trickster series.) I thought a big part of the Harry Potter series was the message that we make our own choices and design our own fate, regardless of who or what others assume we're going to be/do. Having little James Potter strongly resemble older James Potter seemed to undermine that message, and even little Lily Potter resembled older Lily Potter. Again, it's just a snippet, but I didn't like the implication.

*I wanted to know more about Harry's role in Teddy Lupin's life. Aside from Dumbledore, Sirius was the most important and most influential adult in Harry's life, and even that's arguable, because Harry felt a more personal connection to Sirius, who was the closest thing Harry ever had to a loving parent. I thought it was an important and well-crafted piece of parallelism to have Harry willingly accept the role of godfather, since his godfather had such an impact on his life, and he would see it as a big and serious (pun intended!) responsibility. It makes sense to have Andromeda and Ted raise their grandson, but I wished we'd had a little more follow through on the exact nature of Harry's relationship with his godson. (UPDATE--I re-re-read the last chapter, and there's one line where someone comments that Teddy comes over for dinner three or four times a week. Works for me.)

*I have a theory that most authors are either good at beginnings or endings, but not both. There are exceptions in both directions--some are good at both, some are good at neither. But in general, most excel at one but not the other, and JKR's strength definitely lies with beginnings, not endings. Thinking about it, I realized that the endings were some of the weakest parts of all the books, with the possible exception of Half Blood Prince. Sure, the scenes leading up to the endings were generally quite good, but a lot of the endings themselves were a bit flat compared to the rest of the stories. The beginnings, on the other hand, grabbed the readers' attention and dragged them into the story, and were for the most part well done.

*Regardless of what I said above, I did not and do not totally loath the ending. In fact, there are a lot of things I like about it. Again, I think the last line works very well, and I wish the rest of the epilogue had the same subtlety as that last line. And if it had to contain children, then I like that the epilogue took place at Platform 9 and 3/4, because it did symbolize a continuing journey, and more importantly, it was the start of Harry's journey towards love and family, the entire point of the story, and now he's back in the same spot, surrounding by his loving family (including Ron, Hermione, Teddy, etc.) It did have a nice roundness to it. Finally, just a little thing, but I liked Harry and Ginny telling James to watch out for Albus. I saw it as a subtle nod to the influence the Weaselys (a caring, protecting family) had on both Harry and Ginny. It might have driven her nuts at times, but in the end Ginny was glad that she grew up with six older brothers watching her back, and she's passing the message on to her son. Similarly, Harry saw that by sticking together, the Weasleys managed to stay strong and healthy (by which I mean they came out of the entire tragedy more or less as loving and caring as they'd been at the beginning) and he's passing that message on to his own children.

--Cates