Do You Feel Like a Goblin?

In some circumstances I am considered outspoken. Particular meetings, trainings, work groups. I'm one of the louder voices and have to watch I don't drown out others. When I have thoughts, I share them, and some topics and situations prompt me to speak freely. The rest of the time, though, I don't have much to say. It's not a conscious choice, I just don't have a response to many situations and when asked I draw a blank.

That's why the thought of seeing a therapist leaves me cold; I have no idea what I'd say. Just like countless moments I can think of when I've been asked if I have questions or thoughts and my simple response is, "No." Just like the phone call check-in I just had with my also working-from-home newer supervisor. He didn't give me anything with meat to react to, just wanted to know how things are going. "Fine." A few different versions of that general dialogue and he was like, "I should have known you wouldn't have much to say because you keep your thoughts and feelings to yourself."

Part of me acknowledges the truth of the statement, but part of me takes umbrage. He didn't bring anything of substance to the conversation and it wasn't a moment I felt the need to provide it. I wasn't trying to be elusive or difficult, just honest. I have nothing to say in response to what you are asking. If you want more, ask me something better. Again, part of me knows that is poor communication and social skills. I feel like a reticent kid asked how his day at school went. Of course, a quick search turns up countless results offering more engaging questions to ask instead. Generalities just don't spark thought the way a more meaningful question does. With anyone, much less with an extreme introvert not given to small talk.

I don't think I'm saying anything particularly original, interesting, or insightful here, but I bring it up as a way of chiding myself for not giving myself better writing prompts to react to. Just like conversation, I enjoy writing when I feel I have something to say, but remain silent the rest of the time. I also enjoy creating this blog, but only get around to it when I feel compelled. At this moment in time, working from home and living through a historic pandemic, I want to contribute thoughts more often to chronicle the experience, but have so far been drawing a blank besides what I often do, dumping in a bunch of what I've been reading lately. So, in place of actual content, my original work for this post is this disclaimer saying I don't have any original work this time. I'll see if I can do better next time.

And, now, an assortment of odd things to share.

For poetry month, related to a work thing, my attempt today at creating some topical Haiku. They're lousy poetry, but give a hint of insight into current circumstances.


Essence. Essential.
Existential. Exist. I
Bathe in life’s essence.


Shelter in distant
Spaces, looking for others
Present by proxy


Walls protect against
Infection sight sound touch the
Influence of Them


Bees buzz by flowers
Sun shines on newly green grass
Absence of people


Calm air stifles life
I require movement, the wind
Forms breath fresh and new

Of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh:

Synopsis from Goodreads: During Sarah Smarsh’s turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country’s changing economic policies solidified her family’s place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country and examine the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty can have on individuals, families, and communities, and she explores this idea as lived experience, metaphor, and level of consciousness.

Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up as the daughter of a dissatisfied young mother and raised predominantly by her grandmother on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland. Combining memoir with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, Heartland is an uncompromising look at class, identity, and the particular perils of having less in a country known for its excess.

My review:

Incisive and wise. Smarsh uses stories of generations of her family to process and attempt to understand her own experience, which in turn articulates the experience of so many others. The result is both a deeply intimate memoir and insightful social and political analysis. In the course of telling her stories she exposes the greater context within which they existed.

It feels misleading to say this book makes me feel seen. I did not grow up in the same economic circumstances as Smarsh with the same hard-living history in my family. We were Mennonite not Catholic. We didn't farm and I've never felt truly country. Yet so much of it rings true. I grew up in the same part of the country as she did, just 30 miles the other way from Wichita. I'm a few years older, but similar enough in age to recognize her references and influences. Most of all, her environment was mine. I know the landscape she is describing. I wasn't in her shoes, but I saw those who were all around me. And I've lived with many of the same questions and feelings she uses her anecdotes to embody.

All of which is to say I don't necessarily represent a typical reader and don't review this from a neutral perspective. That disclaimer in place, I think the book is brilliant. Smarsh weaves family history, poetic descriptions, sociology, and personal reflection beautifully. It is not a linear telling, instead circling back through the same timelines repeatedly, each time adding layers of perspective and understanding. And, just as it makes me feel seen even as someone on the mere periphery of her experiences, it makes visible a whole world of people so often overlooked by everyone not them. This is what storytelling should be.

But the American Dream has a price tag on it. The cost changes depending on where you’re born and to whom, with what color skin and with how much money in your parents’ bank account. The poorer you are, the higher the price. You can pay an entire life in labor, it turns out, and have nothing to show for it. Less than nothing, even: debt, injury, abject need.

-----

I'd like to honor you by trying to articulate what no one articulated for me: what it means to be a poor child in a rich country founded on the promise of equality.

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When I was growing up, the United States had convinced itself that class didn't exist here. I'm not sure I even encountered the concept until I read some old British novel in high school. This lack of acknowledgment at once invalidated what we were experiencing and shamed us if we tried to express it. Class was not discussed, let alone understood. This meant that, for a child of my disposition--given to prodding every family secret, to sifting old drawers for clues about the mysterious people I loved--every day had the quiet pinning of frustration. The defining feeling of my childhood was that of being told there wasn't a problem when I knew damn well there was.

-----

I rarely saw the place I called home described or tended to in political discourse, the news media, or popular culture as anything but a stereotype or something that happened a hundred years ago.

We were so invisible as to be misrepresented even in caricature, lumped in with other sorts of poor whites, derogatory terms applied to us even if they didn't make sense.

We lived on the open prairie, so we weren't the "hillbillies" of the Smoky Mountains or the Ozarks. We weren't "roughnecks" in oil fields; Kansas had a humble tap on oil thousands of feet below the prairie, but nothing like Oklahoma or Texas to the south.

"Redneck" and "cracker" didn't quite translate, since their American usage was rooted in the slave South, against which Kansas had lit many of the fires that sparked the Civil War. . . . That's not to say white abolitionists were morally righteous on the matter of race or that black and brown Kansans were treated well. But it's a different history to come out of, as a poor white.

Slang terms for my plains ancestors who built dwellings there from sod, the only available material for lack of trees, didn't survive in common vernacular. We were so willfully forgotten in American culture that the most common slur toward us was one applied to poor whites anywhere: "white trash." Or, since we moved in and out of mobile homes, "trailer trash."

-----

What it means to be "country," though, has changed in the few decades of my lifetime, I think, from an experience to a brand cultivated by conservative forces. . . .

For me, country was not a look, a style, or even a conscious attitude but a physical place, its experience defined by distance from the forces of culture that would commodify it.

-----

Psychologists say shame developed as an evolutionary function to curb bad individual behavior that could harm the group. But modern society has a way of shaming some people for no crime other than being born. Your original sin, the one I know well, would have been being born in need of economic help.

In the United States, the shaming of the poor is a unique form of bigotry in that it's not necessarily about who or what you are--your skin color, the gender you're attracted to, having a womb. Rather it's about what your actions have failed to accomplish--financial success within capitalism--and the related implications about your worth in a supposed meritocracy.

-----

Society’s contempt for the poor becomes the poor person’s contempt for herself.

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Was I a good kid or a bad kid? The answer to that question, I knew from both Catholicism and capitalism, would decide my fate. Heaven or hell. Wealth or poverty. Freedom or prison.

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It was a sociology course the spring of my junior year that dismantled my views about fiscal policy. Study after study that I found in my research for the class plainly said in hard numbers that, if you are poor, you are likely to stay poor, no matter how hard you work. As I examined the graphs over and over, my heart sped up with shock and anger. On the matter of my own country's economic system, for all my family wisdom about what something ought to cost and who was peddling a con, I had been sold a bill of goods.

The people I'd grown up with were missing that information. But the liberal people I met in college often were missing another sort of information: What it feels like to pee in a cup to qualify for public benefits to feed your children. A teenager's frustration when a dilapidated textbook is missing a page and there's no computer in the house for finding the lesson online. The impossibility of paying a citation for expired auto insurance, itself impossible to pay despite fifty hours a week holding metal frying baskets at KFC.

It wasn't that I'd been wrong to be suspicious of government programs, I realized, but that I'd been wrong to believe in the American Dream. They were two sides of the same trick coin--one promising a good life in exchange for your labor and the other keeping you just alive enough to go on laboring.

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Economic destitution is just one of many possible poverties, of course. People of all backgrounds experience a sense of poorness--not enough of this or that thing that money can't buy. But financial poverty is the one shamed by society, culture, unchecked capitalism, public policy, our very way of speaking. If you're poor in a wealthy place, common vocabulary suggests that economic failure is a failure of the soul.

Of Changeling (The Oddmire #1) by William Ritter:

Synopsis from Goodreads: Magic is fading from the Wild Wood. To renew it, goblins must perform an ancient ritual involving the rarest of their kind—a newborn changeling. But when the fateful night arrives to trade a human baby for a goblin one, something goes terribly wrong. After laying the changeling in a human infant’s crib, the goblin Kull is briefly distracted from his task. By the time he turns back, the changeling has already perfectly mimicked the human child. Too perfectly: Kull cannot tell them apart. Not knowing which to bring back, he leaves both babies behind.

Tinn and Cole are raised as human twins, neither knowing what secrets may be buried deep inside one of them. Then when they are twelve years old, a mysterious message arrives, calling the brothers to be heroes and protectors of magic. The boys must leave behind their sleepy town of Endsborough and risk their lives in the Wild Wood, crossing the perilous Oddmire swamp and journeying through the Deep Dark to reach the goblin horde and discover who they truly are.

My review:

A nearly perfect magical adventure for young readers. A narrative voice that is equal parts enchanting and amusing. An original world full of familiar ingredients that never feel derivative. A fast pace, multiple mysteries, and a cast of characters worth rooting for. Dark, menacing danger and the triumph of love. I want to recommend this to every 8-12 year-old I know.

One of the bits I particularly loved:

"Do you feel like a goblin?"

"Sometimes?" Cole sighed. "I don't know!"

Fable watched his expression with interest.

"It's like this," Cole tried. "I don't mean to be trouble. It's not like I do it on purpose. Not usually. I mean--sometimes." He felt his ears get hot as the words tumbled clumsily in his mouth. "Sometimes I get an idea, and it feels like a really good idea at the time, and so I just do it. I don't even feel like I'm doing something bad until it's too late. But it is a bad idea. It's pretty much always a bad idea, but I still did it, and I'll still do it again the next time, too. And worse, when I've already messed up, I almost always know what I should do to make things better, but I get another bad idea instead, and I just do that. I don't mean to screw everything up. I just--it's like there's something inside me that wants to make everything . . . I don't know . . . bad."

Fable nodded sagely. "So, is that a goblin feeling, or a person feeling?"

"I don't know." Cole slumped down on the log beside her. "I worry sometimes that it is the goblin. I don't want to be the changeling. I don't want my mom to not really be my mom." He rubbed the back of his neck and stared at his muddy shoes. "But, other times . . . "

"Other times what?"

"Other times I don't worry. Other times I wish."

"You wish you were a goblin?"

"Sort of? A little? Ugh. I mean--goblins are supposed to cause all kinds of mischief and run around having crazy adventures, you know? Maybe being the changeling would be kind of okay."

"But you already make mischief as a human boy. Why would being a goblin be different?"

"Well, if I was a goblin, maybe I wouldn't have to feel bad about it."

"Goblins don't feel bad about stuff?"

"I don't know! Argh! All I know is that people who might be goblins feel bad about stuff all the time! That's why I think if might just be better for everybody if I wasn't a real boy." He sagged. "That--and the other thing."

"What's the other thing?"

Cole glanced at the pine tree. He lowered his voice. "If I'm the one who doesn't belong," he said, "if I'm the goblin child--then Tinn doesn't have to be. I don't want to go live in some wild goblin horde, not really. Not even when I'm feeling especially wicked. I don't want to lose my mom and my brother. But Tinn . . . I could never do that to him. He's not as strong as me."

"I thought you were exactly the same."

"Only on the outside. On the inside . . . " Cole sighed again, trying to find the words. "Tinn's special. He's just--he's a better person than I am. If all the worst stuff we do is because of me, then all the best stuff we do is because of Tinn. He's . . . good, deep down. Even when I'm terrible, he never leaves me to get in trouble alone. He's always fixing my mistakes. If I could do one worthy thing in my whole life, it would be letting Tinn be the real boy."

Fable nodded, but her brows furrowed. "I can't tell. Are you more worried that you are a goblin or more worried that you're not?"

Cole sighed again. "Yes?" he said.

One original thought I shared recently on Facebook:

I remember in library school they taught us about the "paradigm shift from 'just in case' service to 'just in time.'" That the world no longer operated on a model of having enough copies/stock/product stored away just in case it was needed, but focused on being able to move it from elsewhere when needed to arrive just in time. And I remember thinking there were scenarios when that would be problematic. Like, say, a sudden surge in need for medical supplies and services that the model can't handle . . .

And, to capture a bit of the timeline to date:

March 11

March 20

March 26

March 27

‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus Spotlights Class Divide

Across the country, there is a creeping consciousness that despite talk of national unity, not everyone is equal in times of emergency.

“This is a white-collar quarantine,” said Howard Barbanel, a Miami-based entrepreneur who owns a wine company. “Average working people are bagging and delivering goods, driving trucks, working for local government.” . . .

Still, a kind of pandemic caste system is rapidly developing: the rich holed up in vacation properties; the middle class marooned at home with restless children; the working class on the front lines of the economy, stretched to the limit by the demands of work and parenting, if there is even work to be had.

The Amazon Warehouse Worker Who Can’t Stay Home

Because of the coronavirus, demand has shot up. We’re now required to work five days a week, 10 hours a day. We’re short-staffed; half my team isn’t showing up. They’re scared, or they’re sick. I don’t know. Rumors have been circulating that 50 workers here are being tested for the coronavirus. I know at least one is positive. A single mom told me, “I can’t risk getting sick.” She was worried that if our city went on lockdown, she wouldn’t be able to get back to her kids. She stopped coming. I live with my extended family: little babies, older people. Every day, I wonder: What could I bring back to them?

I often say I live at Amazon half the week, but now it’s most of the week. I sleep all day and wake up at 3 or 4 p.m. Eat, drive to work, arrive around 5:30, get water, try to use the bathroom. The bathroom situation is a constant challenge. In a 10-hour shift, I get two 15-minute breaks and a 30-minute lunch break. And then I get 30 minutes of “time off task” — to do whatever I need to. But a normal bathroom trip can take seven to 10 minutes round-trip, depending on the station you’re assigned to that day, so you can really only manage three trips over the whole shift. I have to drink a lot to stay hydrated, because the work is physical, and I’m trying to wash my hands thoroughly. Sometimes I don’t go to the bathroom when I need to because I’m close to getting a write-up. I can’t chance it. If you go over your “time off task,” for whatever reason, you get a write-up. Six write-ups, you’re fired.

Farmworkers, Mostly Undocumented, Become ‘Essential’ During Pandemic

But the widening coronavirus pandemic has brought an unusual kind of recognition: Her job as a field worker has been deemed by the federal government as “essential” to the country.

Ms. Silva, who has spent much of her life in the United States evading law enforcement, now carries a letter from her employer in her wallet, declaring that the Department of Homeland Security considers her “critical to the food supply chain.”

“It’s like suddenly they realized we are here contributing,” said Ms. Silva, a 43-year-old immigrant from Mexico who has been working in the clementine groves south of Bakersfield, Calif. . . .

Letters notifying undocumented workers that they are “essential,” when they still officially face potential deportation, are sending the same mixed signals that have long been at the root of American agricultural labor policy, according to many who work closely with the process.

“Some people are really confused by the message. The government is telling them it needs them to go to work, but it hasn’t halted deportations,” said Reyna Lopez, executive director of P.C.U.N., a union representing agricultural workers in Woodburn, Ore.

Yuval Noah Harari: The World After Coronavirus

In this time of crisis, we face two particularly important choices. The first is between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment. The second is between nationalist isolation and global solidarity. . . .

Centralised monitoring and harsh punishments aren’t the only way to make people comply with beneficial guidelines. When people are told the scientific facts, and when people trust public authorities to tell them these facts, citizens can do the right thing even without a Big Brother watching over their shoulders. A self-motivated and well-informed population is usually far more powerful and effective than a policed, ignorant population. . . .

But to achieve such a level of compliance and co-operation, you need trust. People need to trust science, to trust public authorities, and to trust the media. Over the past few years, irresponsible politicians have deliberately undermined trust in science, in public authorities and in the media. Now these same irresponsible politicians might be tempted to take the high road to authoritarianism, arguing that you just cannot trust the public to do the right thing. . . .

The coronavirus epidemic is thus a major test of citizenship. In the days ahead, each one of us should choose to trust scientific data and healthcare experts over unfounded conspiracy theories and self-serving politicians. If we fail to make the right choice, we might find ourselves signing away our most precious freedoms, thinking that this is the only way to safeguard our health. . . .

In previous global crises — such as the 2008 financial crisis and the 2014 Ebola epidemic — the US assumed the role of global leader. But the current US administration has abdicated the job of leader. It has made it very clear that it cares about the greatness of America far more than about the future of humanity.

This administration has abandoned even its closest allies. When it banned all travel from the EU, it didn’t bother to give the EU so much as an advance notice — let alone consult with the EU about that drastic measure. It has scandalised Germany by allegedly offering $1bn to a German pharmaceutical company to buy monopoly rights to a new Covid-19 vaccine. Even if the current administration eventually changes tack and comes up with a global plan of action, few would follow a leader who never takes responsibility, who never admits mistakes, and who routinely takes all the credit for himself while leaving all the blame to others.

If the void left by the US isn’t filled by other countries, not only will it be much harder to stop the current epidemic, but its legacy will continue to poison international relations for years to come. Yet every crisis is also an opportunity. We must hope that the current epidemic will help humankind realise the acute danger posed by global disunity.