Why are these coins so interesting? They represent the period of 19th-early 20th century imperialism that has played such a major role in making the modern world. But they’re also fascinating from a design angle. Colonial coins often carry strange denominations, bear inscriptions in two languages or more and depict the face of a monarch or a state seal that would have been totally foreign to most of the people actually using the coins.

Imperialism has existed in some sense since the ancient days of Sargon, Hammurabi and Ashurbanipal. But imperialism as we think of it today truly kicked off in the sixteenth century with the carving up of the New World by Spain and Portugal by way of the Treaty of Tordesillas with Pope Alexander VI (that crazy debauched Borgia, yes) as mediator.

Treaties looked fancier then than they do now. (Source: Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa.)

Portugal got something of a raw deal, coming away with just Brazil, while Spain got all the rest of what is today Latin America. The natives of the region from northern Mexico to the Andes, who at this point did not realize their lands had been signed over to the crown of Spain (and didn’t know what Spain was, for that matter) were quickly subdued. Those who didn’t die of disease were used as slave labor, often in the brutal and deadly field of silver mining.

A piece of Spanish cob coinage made in 1715. Every cob coin bore the Habsburg coat of arms and a cross on the opposite side. (Source: Augi Garcia for Daniel Frank Sedwick, LLC Auction Treasure)

The Spanish conquerors of the Americas made a big show of bringing monks to convert the natives for the sakes of their souls and all that business, but what they truly wanted was silver and gold. They wanted precious metals so badly that the coins of New Spain were not minted in the normal fashion. Instead of rolling sheets of silver and gold into uniform thicknesses and cutting round planchets which would then be struck, the American mints simply cut irregularly-shaped pieces of silver bars into equal weights that they stamped on the front and back. This was a quick and dirty method of coin production, but it worked: in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, Spanish cob coinage was a standard unit of trade and exchange. And not only in Europe. These coins found themselves changing hands in the ports of British America, the African coast and south Asia.

In the 17th century, the newly independent United Republic of the Netherlands would get into the business of imperialism. This strange coin was minted by the Dutch East India Company for use on Sumatra in modern-day Indonesia.

By the late 18th century, however, Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands had passed into secondary power status. Their old spots at the top of the imperialist mountain were taken by Britain and France, two powers that had been bitter rivals for centuries.

This French Indochina coin was minted in 1947, eighty years after Napoleon III’s gunboats sailed down the rivers of southeast Asia and took power over the region. Strangely enough, it depicts the female symbol of liberty that’s so common on French coins. At the time, the French colonial forces were fighting against rebels in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to maintain their nearly century-old hold on their piece of Asia. It takes some nerve to stamp a symbol of freedom on a coin that pretty much represents exactly the opposite for the people who have to use it.

The British were a little more honest with their coinage. Britain never messed around with any of the dramatic emblems and sayings of liberty, equality and fraternity that their French cousins loved so much. Its shift from autocracy to democracy was a lot more gradual and, with the exception of the uncharacteristically nuts years of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth of England, less bloody.

This fact is reflected in Britain’s constant, almost never-changing coinage. And of course, when it came to imperialist power in the 19th century, the French couldn’t even hope to touch Great Britain.

A royal family portrait. Top left, George V, on his right and below his son, George VI, and bottom right George VI’s daughter and now queen, Elizabeth II. The right-hand pieces are British one and two shillings, and the left are Commonwealth coins.

The British had forged a worldwide empire that rivaled the ancient Roman Empire in scope and reach. One look at their coins suggests that the British authorities totally understood this connection and meant to push
it. The coins of the British Empire have all kinds of symbols and inscriptions on their reverses, but their obverses always bear the same image – the face of the monarch. The monarch’s head may be crowned, as it is on the British Indian rupee, or it may be bare. Sometimes the inscription around the edge is in English, but more often it’s in Latin (this tradition survives with the inscription on modern British coins, ELIZABETH D. G. REGINA, or “Elizabeth by the grace of God Queen.”) Sometimes the face changes, as it does when a king or queen dies and the heir takes the throne. Sometimes it gets older – the current Queen Elizabeth has gone through four different portraits depicting her from ages 25 to 80.

A British Indian one anna. The obverse refers to George VI as King (of Great Britain etc.) and Emperor (of India.) The reverse carries inscriptions in English, Hindu, Urdu and a couple of other languages I’m not familiar with.

But the message is always the same. This is your lord, it says. More to the point, This is the country that rules over you, and don’t forget it. Many modern post-imperialist British Commonwealth coins still bear the Queen’s face but no longer carry this weighty political statement.

This coin was also minted by British authorities for a foreign people, but you wouldn’t be able to tell. The other side of the coin simply bears the denomination, one mil. Why doesn’t it have the king’s face on the front? Because it was crafted for Palestine, which was designated as a post-WWI League of Nations mandate territory along with Transjordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. These were meant not as colonies, but as temporary holdings to be made independent. You know, when the time came. For this reason, the British wisely chose to only print the name of the state and the denomination in English, Arabic and Hebrew and leave off any reference to Kings George V or VI. This was a purely cosmetic decision, though, because the British and the French had the same sort of control over their mandate territories as they did over their official colonies.

What we stamp on our coins says a lot about who we think we are and who we want other people to think we are. The old age of imperialism is dead, but the fact of power and its use and abuse has never changed. At the very least, we should remember exactly what these coins represented to their makers and to the unwilling subjects they were made for.

by Christopher Nolan, David Goyer, Zack Snyder, and a bunch of other Hollywood people

So I went to see the new Superman movie this weekend. Really enjoyed it. It’s not a perfect film, by far. It’s written in full epic movie style, with all the overblown melodrama that implies. But I like its approach to the super hero genre. It has a contemplative tone and hard-hitting action, and it treats Superman’s very familiar power set as an object of awe and wonder. It’s a lot of fun.

So imagine my surprise when I got back from the theater and checked the reactions on-line. The general fanboy consensus seems to be that the film is dark and joyless, and a terrible creative misstep that doesn’t “get” Superman. The “joyless” label is lifted from a comment made by comics writer Mark Waid, whose Birthright series influenced the Man of Steel script. Waid’s reaction is interesting, but it’s full of spoilers, so I’ll deal with it later. First, let me review the film without ruining it for anyone who hasn’t seen it.

Before I talk about anything else, let me get this “dark and joyless” label out of the way. It’s neither of those things. It’s just serious-minded. It treats Superman with respect and a bit of intelligence, and presents his story to us from a different perspective than we’re used to. We start out on Krypton, and spend a good bit of time there, enough for us to see that it’s a dying society as well as a dying planet. The skies are dark, and everything looks old, from the ancient members of the ruling council to the burnished brass look of even the clothing.

That’s Russell Crowe as Jor-El, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked him in the role. He brings a sort of tiredness to the character that speaks volumes about the world that birthed Our Hero. This is not to say that the Krypton stuff is completely about decay, however. There’s some great pulpy ridiculousness in the sequence that I won’t spoil here, and Crowe still has enough of the adventure hero in him to pull it off.

We also meet our villain in this sequence, and that’s where things really take off. Michael Shannon’s General Zod is fantastic, a menacing fascist who looks like he stepped right off the pages of a Kirby comic.

That face!

Check out the super-suit Zod’s wearing there. Jor-El has one, too, worn beneath the more ornate outer clothing you see above. Which means that, yes, the Superman costume really is long underwear. Heh.

And since we’re talking about it, here’s the outfit itself:

This take on the super-suit has, of course, caused some strife in fan circles, but I like it, personally. The traditional red trunks are better from a design perspective, but this one looks fine without. They do some particularly nice stuff with the cape. It flaps and billows prettily, and its noise adds some extra oomph when Superman is in flight. I’m also okay with the slightly darker color scheme. It puts me in mind of one of my favorite versions of Superman, the Fleischer Studios cartoons from the early 1940s. Those were done noir-style, with much of the action taking place at night, and the color palette is pretty close to the one used in this new film:

Getting beyond the cosmetics of Man of Steel, though, I was maybe most happy with the way they approach the super powers. The first flying sequence is great fun, for instance, but it’s the rest of the powers that give the film its contemplative tone. Through a series of flashbacks, we’re shown what it was like for Clark Kent to grow up super in a world of normal human beings. The slow development of his super senses is maybe the most interesting thing. Imagine being a kid in elementary school and suddenly being bombarded with sensory input from x-ray eyes, and ears that can hear every sound in a crowded building. It’s a long hard process just learning to shut it all out, and I get the sense that even as a grown man, he hasn’t yet learned to use the powers so much as work around them.

Young Clark has to learn a super-human level of restraint as well, though, and that restraint forms the film’s thematic core. Jonathan Kent is, perhaps rightly, afraid of how the world will react when it learns that there’s a god-like alien living in their midst, and so he teaches Clark to hide his abilities. That’s something Clark takes with him into adulthood, moving from place to place and helping people in secret (kind of like Bill Bixby without the anger management issues). That’s how we get to the “bearded Clark” stuff from the ad campaign, and one of my favorite life-saving sequences, with Our Hero rushing into a burning oil refinery to save trapped workers.

Shirtless Clark! Because the ladies need eye candy, too.

I like the idea of the young Superman essentially being a burly life-saving tough guy, and Henry Cavill fills that role every bit as well as he does the more traditional square-jawed good guy Superman becomes by the end of the film.

I should take a moment to praise Cavill for his performance here, in fact. It’s not easy portraying the world’s biggest boy scout in a way that resonates with modern audiences. Christopher Reeve handled it by playing the part with a quiet confidence that I’ve always liked. But I’ve never connected with Reeve’s Superman as a real character. Good as that performance is, it’s really a subdued sort of camp more than anything else. Cavill, on the other hand, is given the opportunity to show the character growing from the deeply sad and conflicted Clark Kent into the openly heroic Superman. Things have to get pretty bad for him to come out of the spandex closet, but once he does, there’s a palpable sense of relief. It’s the same guy, but with a tremendous weight taken off his shoulders, and that feeling is down to Cavill’s performance.

The acting’s very good in general here, though. I’ve already praised Michael Shannon’s performance as Zod, but Kevin Costner and Diane Lane absolutely KILL as Ma and Pa Kent. All the Kansas flashbacks are good, and it’s their performances that make them so. A lot goes unsaid in this script, but Costner and Lane own their characters so completely that you don’t need them to say much anyway.

I’d like to be able to say the same about Amy Adams’ Lois Lane, but… Well, Lois is something of a cypher here. I’m very happy with how the film establishes her as a top-notch investigative reporter, but beyond that she’s a blank slate of a character with weak development that’s not backed up by the same kind of acting chops Cavill, Costner and Lane give us.  But to really talk successfully about Lois, I’m going to have to get into spoiler territory. Which means it might be time for me to wrap up the spoiler-free portion of tonight’s entertainment.

Ultimately, I’d say that Man of Steel, while not a great film, is a really great super hero movie. It offers a fresh, serious-minded take on the oldest super hero there is, and delivers some spectacular action in what may be the best super hero fights ever put to film. It’s not a glib pop culture construct like the Marvel films have been, and I for one am glad it’s not. Fun as those movies might be, they’re like popcorn. Tasty, but with little weight. Man of Steel strives to be something more, and succeeds more than it fails. For me, that’s a win.

Now, on to the SPOILERS… After the jump.

Okay, first let’s tackle Lois Lane. Man of Steel does one thing with her that I absolutely love: she figures out Superman’s secret identity before he even puts on the suit. It’s a good way to side-step the sticky problem of the great investigative reporter who can’t tell that the mystery man she’s always kissing actually works with her behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. It’s also a good way to side-step the even stickier problem of Our Noble Hero keeping his biggest secret from the woman he loves. In a lighter version of the story, it might play as screwball comedy. But if you want the audience to relate to these characters as believable people, it just doesn’t fly.

So I’m glad they got it out of the way early. Here’s the problem: we don’t get enough sense of Lois Lane as the tough, ball-busting investigative journalist for it to matter much when she goes soft and decides not to run the story because she believes in Clark’s good intentions. I think maybe we’re supposed to; Lois is given an “I’ll quit if you don’t run the story” moment with Perry White early on, but Amy Adams doesn’t give the character enough fire. All her scenes are played with the same sort of bland affect, whether she’s arguing with Perry, making doe eyes at Superman, or cringing from the evil villains. There’s no spark to the performance, and so Lois remains an enigma. Which, considering that they’re setting her up as Superman’s partner instead of his clueless kinda-girlfriend, is a crying shame.

So, yes, Margot Kidder is still the best screen Lois ever.

Alright, so. Mark Waid. As I said earlier, Waid’s take on Man of Steel is interesting. It can be read here:
http://thrillbent.com/blog/man-of-steel-since-you-asked/
, and it’s worth the time if you’re a funnybook dork. I suppose I should state up-front that I’m not a big fan of Waid’s comics; I think his ideas are often very strong, but his execution of them usually leaves me cold. Some people like chocolate, some like vanilla. No biggie.

I do respect him as a funnybook historian and philosopher, though, and the things he says about comics usually interest me. This review is no different. In fact, his thoughts on Man of Steel are, for the most part, very close to my own. I like his take on the death of Pa Kent, especially. Pa essentially sacrifices himself to keep Clark’s secret, and Clark stands by and watches as his beloved father is swept away by a tornado. That scene’s been controversial with some fans, but I love it. I love the serenity on Kevin Costner’s face just before the twister gets him, and I love what it says about how very scared he was for his son’s safety. And I love it for another reason I hadn’t quite been able to put my finger on before I read Waid’s review. So let me just quote that paragraph in its entirety, because I couldn’t say it better, even now:

So, yes. Yes, exactly. Best Pa Kent death ever. Good on ya, Mr. Waid!

Where he and I part company is on the issue of character death. Thousands, possibly millions, of people are killed in Superman’s fights with Zod and his troops, and Waid is bothered by the fact that Our Hero doesn’t try to draw the fights away into unpopulated areas. I will admit, that’s a standard super hero kind of thing to do, and it did cross my mind as I watched the incredible destruction being unleashed. But I was willing to let that go, because we do see Superman saving a life or two in the midst of all the destruction, and because we’re looking at a brand new Superman here. He’s only just learned how to fly, for god’s sake! So I’m okay with him not yet having the wherewithall to fight for his life and be tactically responsible at the same time. That can come later.

What really breaks Waid’s brain, though, is the biggest spoiler of the film: in the end, Superman is forced to kill General Zod. They build to it for the entirety of the final battle, with Zod starting the fight off by vowing to kill every human on Earth. He’ll never stop, and Superman knows it. Moreover, Zod’s fully come into his powers by this point, and he’s better at using them than Superman himself.

Is this a man you can reason with? I think not.

The only thing keeping him from flash-frying a family of three is the headlock Superman’s got him in, and Zod’s still inching toward them with his heat vision. So Our Hero breaks the villain’s neck, and ends the threat. It’s a tough scene that forces Superman to make a hard decision that he immediately regrets, even though he knows it’s the only thing he could have done.

Now, I like that sort of thing. I like seeing heroes put through the ringer and having to choose the best of two bad options. To my way of thinking, that’s good drama. But for many fans (Mark Waid included), it breaks a cardinal rule. In their minds, Superman doesn’t kill. Ever. And I can understand their feelings there. His code against killing was instituted for the 1940s radio series, and became canon in the comics soon thereafter. It’s been a big part of his moral make-up for decades, and has been the basis for some very good stories. So I understand the Fanboy Rage. Really, I do.

But it’s not a perspective I can share. While I certainly don’t want to see a Superman that kills indiscriminately, the code against killing really isn’t integral to the character for me. As long as he’s a good and decent man who’s dedicated his life to helping people, I think you’ve pretty much got the character nailed. So I’m fine with him taking a life under dire circumstances, as an absolute last resort, to save innocent lives. And I’m especially fine with it if it’s a young Superman who hasn’t completely mastered his abilities yet, and if he’s anguished by the act. Again, that’s good drama in my book.

So. Man of Steel. Damn fine spandex movie, or betrayal of everything Superman stands for? As I’ve already said, I come down on the damn fine movie side. But if you’re a really hardcore funnybook dork… If you can’t let go of the character as he was written in your childhood… It might not be the film for you. But if you want a modern take on an old favorite, I think you’ll be pleased.

Did I mention that in the same episode Jake gets accepted to a school for writers that’s based out of Wellington, NZ?

Interested in science fiction and fantasy from a young age, by the mid-90′s one of my favourite programs was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. There were many bizarre futuristic aspects of the universe depicted in this program that I accepted without question. However, in one episode (titled Explorers) the captain’s son asks him to read a story he has written. The text of the son’s story is displayed on a small digital tablet (remember, this was aired in the mid-90′s) and I remember thinking at the time “no one will ever want to read off something like that.”

Imagine my surprise.

Even at a tender age I thought this kind of reading looked hard on the eyes and lacked the tangibility of a paper book. This kind of reading wasn’t real enough…even for the United Federation of Planets. But I’ll tell you what futuristic book technology I did love. I loved Penny’s computer book on Inspector Gadget.

For those who never experienced it, Inspector Gadget is a program from the early 80′s where a bumbling cyborg detective attempts to out-wit his nemesis, Dr. Claw. In this recurring quest, Gadget is assisted by his dog Brain and his niece Penny. Penny’s best tool in aiding Gadget is a computer built into a book. Imagined in the early 80′s, Penny’s computer book anticipated video chat, regulation and control of outside devices and the existence of a database probably comparable in size to the internet.  But I don’t think it was these capabilities that so entranced me. Rather, I think it was the idea of advanced technology held in such a familiar and trustworthy package. Penny’s computer book looks (and I assume feels) like a hardcover book. Where the still laptop-like packaging of today’s e-readers and tablets suggests, to my mind, the idea that all worthy knowledge is now to be digitally gained, the binding and leaves of Penny’s computer book show that it is technology rooted in what came before it, paper and the ink on a writer’s fingertips.  I bet it smells nice too.

In the past few months I have begun to make my peace with e-reading, mainly after a surprisingly positive experience with the Kobo Glo (more on this to come). And yet, if I didn’t think it was a fire hazard, I’d probably be gluing a binding, intro and appendices around my laptop this second.

Liz Gillett

Written by P.J. Hoover

A world in which children are sent to battle to the death for our amusement. One in which the moon has been knocked from its orbit. And another in which scientists weed out inferior humans. Recent young adult literature is filled with grim scenarios of utter destruction. My newest book, Solstice, is a dystopian novel (with a huge mythological twist) set in future Austin, Texas during a time when global warming is destroying the earth. Daily temperatures are 115 degrees F or higher, and giant retractable domes have been built over the city to help protect those who live there. The global heating crisis is a slow, yet severely damaging, process; in this world, food and water shortages are the norm and government officials are constantly looking for an edge.

As the mother of two kids, I am constantly looking for reading material with content appropriate for their ages. It used to be easy in elementary school, but as they reach the upper grades, I struggle with the issue of how young is too young to read about certain topics or to read certain books. It’s one thing to write the books, but how do I feel about my own kids reading these dystopian tales?

Now I’ll be honest. I immediately put Solstice in the hands of my middle-schooler, and not just because I am the author. I adore dystopian novels, and I want to share that love with my kids. My bookshelves are lined with these types of novels, and my middle-schooler devours them just like I do.

Consider this. A world in which a power mad dictator kills millions. One in which child soldiers are sent to war. And another in which slavery is an acceptable norm. These things really happened. Humans really treated each other this way. The history of the earth is filled with dystopian times, and the stories from these eras are brutal and cruel. And though in concept, these stories are not very different from how so many dystopian novels portray the world, I am reluctant to introduce these horrors to my children.

It’s one thing to escape with a book and enter a fantastical world. Readers can immerse themselves in a world of peril, have great adventures, and be the hero. In Solstice, the reader can follow along as the main character, Piper, escapes to the Underworld in an attempt to save her best friend from death cause by the global heating crisis. They can feel Piper’s panic, fear, and uncertainty. And when the story concludes, readers can return to the safety of their own world and know that the story was make-believe.

It’s another thing to enter a story about the real world. At the end of the story, there is nowhere to return to. The world remains the same world in which the reader lives, except it has now been darkened.

Why do I feel okay about letting my kids read dystopian literature? Because facing reality is an inevitable part of growing up. It can’t be ignored. And in these stories, be they real or fictional, in times of darkness, there are people who are heroes who bring light. No matter how dark the situations may be, there is hope. And that’s what we see in dystopian young adult novels. There is always hope. And that’s why you want your kids to read them.

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From the Tor/Forge June 17th newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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More from the June 17th Tor/Forge newsletter:

• Postultimate Postulations by Ofir Touché Gafla
• The Writer, Not the Song by Alex Bledsoe
• Summer Grab Bag Sweepstakes

I read Ulysses in my first year of college, armed with a “European Literary Tradition” class syllabus and a book of annotations that was nearly as long as the novel itself. The details of Proteus and Stephen Dedalus didn’t stay with me in the least, but what remained was the overwhelming sense of loneliness I felt: people were always sadly eating kidneys in a pub, a kind of dual gastronomic punishment (first the solitude, then the kidneys). For a generation that’s been told that we should never eat alone, Leopold Bloom’s day seems like a cautionary tale (an extremely elaborate one).

Restaurants can be a taunt to the solitary diner: you can’t even be alone with your loneliness when there’s a table of strangers at your elbow. And your pity party of one would have felt particularly grim if you were seated next to James Joyce’s party of ten. When the Joyces went out, they went as a pack—a boisterous one. Hemingway shared the gossip from Paris in his letters: ”[Joyce] and all his family are starving but you can find the whole celtic crew of them every night in Michaud’s, where Binney and I can only afford to go about once a week.” I picture a modern-day Joyce dining out, making it rain Euros while ordering bottle service.

Unlike his withdrawn characters, Joyce’s enjoyment of food was wrapped up in his enjoyment of others, and vice versa. Writing to his brother, Stanislaus, he requested both food and company: “a slice of corned beef and cabbage, a sizeable beefsteak prepared on a gridiron, and (excuse the hierarchy) an intelligent supra-burgher like yourself to share the meal.”

But Joyce’s favorite dining companion was his wife, Nora—who conveniently also did all the cooking. A day with the Joyces meant a day of eating, starting with hot chocolate at 9 a.m. “At midday we have lunch which we (or rather she) buys, cooks (soup, meat, potatoes and something else)…. At four o’clock we have chocolate and at eight o’clock dinner which Nora cooks.” If anyone tells you having multiple hot chocolates a day is wrong, direct them here. 

Eating wasn’t all that went on in the Joyce’s kitchen; if you read their infamously naughty correspondence, you might not want to eat off their dining table when you learn where it’s been. But their exploits prove what Joyce clearly already knew: the kitchen isn’t just a place for the stomach, but for the heart. As he writes to Nora, after a short absence, “I shall not quit the kitchen for a whole week after I arrive, reading, lolling, smoking, and watching you get ready the meals and talking, talking, talking, talking to you. O how supremely happy I shall be! God in heaven, I shall be happy there!”

When Joyce mentions food in his letters, he usually mentions it in bulk: ”I would like roast beef, rice-soup, capuzzi garbi, mashed potatoes, pudding and black coffee,” he writes Nora. “No, no I would like stracotto di maccheroni, a mixed salad, stewed prunes, torroni, tea and presnitz. Or no I would stewed eels or polenta with… Excuse me, dear, I am hungry tonight.”

Browse these endless lists of dishes (which also find their way into Ulysses), and you’ll almost assuredly find a soup or two. Joyce constantly mentions soups and stews in both his letters and his novels; “thick giblet soup” is a favorite of Leopold Bloom, although Joyce has a particular fondness for stracotto, a braised pot roast served with pasta, which he discovered while living in Trieste. It’s a hearty dish, more suitable for a stick-to-your-ribs winter meal than for middle-of-summer Bloomsday, but Leopold Bloom’s meals weren’t particularly seasonal either (Kidneys? Cocoa and cider? in June?).

This is one of those one-pot wonders with flavors so rich, you’ll wonder why it wasn’t more work. As my roast simmered away on the stove, I remembered what Joyce wrote while struggling with Ulysses: ”The ingredients will not fuse until they have reached a certain temperature.” More effort doesn’t always mean a better result. Sometimes it’s just a matter of letting the flavors meld.

(Adapted from Gourmet)

2 pounds boneless chuck roast
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
2 large onions, finely chopped
2 carrots, in 1-inch pieces
2 celery ribs, in 1-inch pieces
6 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup red wine
2 cups beef or veal stock
1 can (14 ounces) crushed tomatoes
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon dried oregano
2 bay leaves
1/2 teapoon red chili flakes
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
1 pound dry rigatoni
Grated parmesan, to taste

1. Pat roast dry with paper towels and season with salt and pepper. In a large pot over medium heat, add 1 teaspoon oil until hot but not smoking. Add meat and brown on both sides, about 12 minutes total. Transfer to a platter and set aside.

2. To the same pot, add remaining 1 tablespoon oil and onion, carrot, celery and garlic. Sauté over moderately high heat until softened and golden, about 5 minutes. Add wine, stock, tomatoes, thyme, oregano, bay leaves, and chili flakes and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low.

3. Return roast with any juices on platter to pot and cover. Braise, turning over once every 30 minutes, until tender enough to shred with a fork, about 3 hours. Add additional wine as needed, if sauce reduces too much.

4. Transfer meat to a cutting board and allow to cool slightly. Meanwhile, discard bay leaves from sauce and, using an immersion blender, purée sauce until texture is thick and even. Cut meat into 2-inch chunks, then shred with 2 forks. Return shredded meat to sauce, and season with salt and pepper.

5. Cook rigatoni in a pot of boiling salted water until al dente. Drain, reserving 1/2 cup of pasta water. Stir water into sauce, then add pasta and stir to coat. Top with grated cheese.

On the day to day scale, it seems ok (well, it probably seems pretty bad to people who have friends, but for me that’s an example of a really good day). But when I think about how long I’ve subsisted on such tiny scraps of positive human interaction, it’s kind of amazing in a way that I haven’t completely lost my mind. 99% of my social interactions come from either customers or managers telling me what I’m supposed to do. That’s not an exaggeration meant to inspire sympathy. It’s simple math. I have no friends, I only see my family maybe one day out of every four months. I work 40 hours a week in retail. Almost every conversation I have in any given week is either with customers or bosses (of which I have 5). When I’m really lucky, I get to exchange a few sentences with coworkers I like. Simple things, like, “How are you today? Busy, isn’t it?” That’s what passes for an exemplary conversation for me these days; we don’t have common interests or anything, so simple pleasantries suffice for me as a meaningful conversation.  I haven’t talked about anything major, like what I want to accomplish in life, or what I want in a romantic relationship, in close to a decade.

Part of me wonders if I even know how to have that sort of conversation anymore, or if it somehow withered away and died in the intervening years. Sometimes I wonder if this is it, if I’ll never have a heart to heart chat with anyone again before I die. It seems dramatic, but if you asked me when I was in my late teens if I thought I’d go almost 10 years without friends or actual conversations, I would have said you were crazy.

I suppose at this point any normal readers who don’t suffer from crippling social anxiety are wondering why the hell I don’t just go out and meet some people. Excellent question, normal readers. Why don’t I just go out and do the thing I’ve been longing to do daily for years on end? Because the thought makes me want to curl into a ball and die.

People, by and large, think psychological ailments are just plain made up. I mean, they don’t really phrase it that way, because denying such a large scientific field outright makes you sound like some sort of conspiracy theorist, but deep down most people who don’t have a mental health problem think it’s all rather silly. They think mental diseases are just excuses agreed upon by groups of people who can’t take responsibility for themselves.

All you have to do to confirm this is listen to the way people try to offer advice to someone who has a mental disease, like our problem is that we’ve just never looked at it logically, because if you have a broken leg, all you need to do to fix it is to look at the leg logically, determine that you really need your leg to be functional, and it’ll heal itself.

I know logically that nothing really bad would happen to me if I tried to introduce myself to people. I know logically that it would be better to try and fail a few times until I find some friends than it is to live such a lonely existence. I can convince myself of these things for brief spans of time; the problem is sustaining that belief for more than a few minutes. Twice I’ve gone out to geek girl meetups, psyching myself up the whole way there, only to have a panic attack at the doorway and turn around to leave without going in. A third time I managed to at least go inside, but I stayed for about two hours without talking to anyone, because at an event for shy nerds to meet friends, pretty much everyone had split off into small groups by the time I got there. If walking up to a stranger looking for friends was hard, walking up to a group who’d already bonded was pretty much impossible.

I’ve written and rewritten an open invitation for geek girls in my area to meet up countless times for the past year or so, thinking it would be easier to talk to people if I was the one organizing the event. But whenever the moment comes to post it, I just can’t, and I feel completely powerless to explain this to people who don’t have social anxiety. I can’t explain how I know I’m not going to be struck dead if I make an effort to meet people, but that I still feel a wave of dread wash over me that obliterates EVERYTHING but the overwhelming need to run, to hide, to get out of the situation and find somewhere safe to hunker down. I can’t logic my way through it, and it just about kills me, because I still feel like I’m at fault for something I can’t control, and that the almost-decade of crushing loneliness and despair is my rightful punishment.

I fantasize about having a best friend the way most people fantasize about meeting their future spouse. But there’s no socially approved way to really discuss such a longing. People understand dating sites and singles bars and wanting to meet that special someone. It just comes across as creepy and sad when you talk about being so utterly desperate to meet a platonic friend instead of a romantic one.

All I want from life is a few good friends to grab a bite of lunch with, to go see a movie with, to play a board game while squealing over Benedict Cumberbatch and Misha Collins together.  It hurts so much to feel like it’s all so close at hand, yet impossible to actually reach out and touch. And always, abreast of that thought, the guilt and shame that I feel knowing it’s something I’m doing to myself, that if I could just be stronger it would all get better.

Half the time I feel like the only way I’ll ever work through my depression and social anxiety is if I figure out how to stop the cycle of self hate and forgive myself, to accept that I’m just trying to survive and deal with everything one day at a time. The other half I feel like the last thing I should do is forgive myself for any part of the mess I have made of my life.

To the first point: One of the things I don’t like about blogging is the demand for conciseness. Though I could in theory write a 5,000-word blog post, I don’t have the time to write it, and no-one wants to take that long to read a blog post. And so I compress, and avoid explaining some of the nuance. My mother, like every human being on the planet, is a complex person.

As to the second point, I relied mostly on a memory I had when I was ten. My father was going to take us to an amusement park near the Kentucky border. My mother said that he couldn’t because he was violating the divorce decree. The police got involved and everything. (In the end, our father took us, but it wasn’t a fun trip. He sat at the entrance and just told us to run off and do whatever. He wouldn’t give us any money whatsoever for concessions, and they charged five cents for water, and so we ran around on a hot day with no fluids.)

And so I tried to remember why there was the big brouhaha, and I thought it had to do with taking us out of the county. But now I have to admit that my memory was wrong here somehow. The trouble could have been that my father never told my mother directly that he was going to take us on the trip, having my brother tell her instead. It could be that, at the time, my mother misunderstood the divorce decree. Or it could have been something else that I can’t think of right now.

All of this calls to mind two important issues. First, autobiography is not memoir. In an autobiography, the author is reporting history. She collects facts and does research, even though she’s writing about her own life. An autobiography focuses on facts. In memoir, the author relies on her memory and the memory of those around her to inform the writing. And a memoirist is not merely reporting history, but is telling a story. She is using plot devices and story structures and all the other elements we use to tell a good story. But real life is not a “good story”. In real life, things don’t have a beginning, middle, and end–life just flows on. But stories demand a beginning, middle, and end, and so the memoirist frames her life to conform to the conventions of storytelling. Similarly, human beings are ridiculously complex, but for the sake of telling a story, especially a shorter story, the writer doesn’t dive into the 37 reasons why a character does what he does.

I am not an autobiographer, I am a memoirist. That distinction is crucial to understanding what I write. I have no intention to get facts wrong or to misrepresent anyone or anything. But I do try to tell a good story. And if I do get something wrong, as I did yesterday, I want to be called out on it so I can get the facts straight. I have learnt that it is better to be wrong and speak up than to be wrong and remain silent. If I speak up, then my wrongness can be pointed out, and I can change my mind and be right, whereas if I remain silent, I stay wrong.

“The Persistence of Memory” by Salvador Dalí

And then there is the niggling issue of the reliability of memory. Science keeps showing us it’s not particularly reliable. The human brain is constantly restructuring itself and putting the pieces together the best it can, albeit imperfectly. We only have the illusion that our memory persists, when in fact our memory warps and melts and drips.

Is this a terrible thing? I’m of the same mind as a former professor of mine, Leah Savion of Indiana University (probably the best teacher I’ve ever had). She has an idea (which I really wish would get some notice in the academic community) that she calls “naive logic”. It’s the premise that, despite all the demonstrable failings of the human mind–its inconsistencies, its inability to grasp even basic logic, and yes, its faulty memory–it has nonetheless served humanity well for several hundred thousand years and is responsible for getting us to evolve to the point we are at. Therefore, despite our brains’ deficiencies, they serve us well nonetheless and therefore ought not to be dismissed when we delve into a deeper understanding of philosophy.

Now, the implications for this idea are profound in many areas of philosophy and cognitive science, and I won’t bother to dive into those here (because, again, none of us wants a 5,000-word blog post). Suffice it to say that I think I, and all of us, are usually doing the best we can with that wad of grey stuff between our ears. It’s part of why I try to treat people with trust and grace, even when others might consider doing so unwarranted. I believe that to live otherwise would be pretty much impossible. We would always be paralyzed, doubting every little fact of the universe.

So keep doing the best you can. I will.