There Are Those Who Consider Me a Mysterious Monolith

A book I read recently included the phrase, My memory of a place that I didn't remember, and I marked it as a particularly poignant concept. In context it was about the narrator visiting a place that had been described to her in vivid detail, but I think it resonated in part because I had just marked for sharing this article from the wonderful Atlas Obscura: Many of You Are Homesick—For a Place You’ve Never Been. It's about a German word, fernweh, that literally translates as “farsickness.” Put another way, it’s the concept of feeling homesick for a place you’ve never been or could never go. A friend on Facebook shared this picture with me from a place they've been that defines fernweh as wanderlust or a desire to explore. An urge to experience new places that come with a sense of familiarity. A lovely idea. It's a yearning I know.

I love to go for wanders through wild places, hikes through woods and open spaces. I don't want to be a true explorer of places never been, but a visitor to isolated areas that are yet to be domesticated. It's a chance to recharge my introvert energy with alone time while feeling connection with nature. And there's a bit of romantic fantasy escape to it. I had a chance for a hike the week of Thanksgiving, and the following Facebook status came to me while I enjoyed it:

Nothing like a hike through an empty, bleak landscape during a mild November rain to remind me of my adolescent fantasies of being Strider.

(Not heroic, to-be-king Aragorn, mind you, but the solitary, mysterious ranger in tune with the land from the early parts of the story.)

Part of my fernweh is to not merely go to new places, but to do so as a different person.

2020 has been a stressful year, as my posts have captured, for a variety of reasons. Recently there has been relief from some of the constant anxiety. I just had two big events at work go well that had been dominating my time, the presidential election turned out right, and Covid-19 vaccines have finished trials and are about to be distributed. Now that I can breath easier about some aspects of reality, I have a stronger yearning to escape than normal. I've been finding myself daydreaming about the fantasy novels and Dungeons & Dragons exploits that have been a happy diversion for much of my life. I've wanted to renew collecting coins for my treasure chest, fall asleep to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, and revisit The Keep on the Borderlands and the Caves of Chaos. And when I go hiking, I'm in training to be Strider or someone like him.

Of course, I've said many times I want to be a generalist and will never be happy specializing in just one calling. So I've spent many, many hours of my life hiking and running outdoors, living and working in nature camps, and nearly majoring in wildlife biology in the hopes of becoming a park ranger--developing myself into Strider--but I've never quite made it my main pursuit. Going with a D&D analogy, I might have a couple of levels as a Ranger, but I am a multiclass character.

As much as I want to be a wanderer of the wilds who defends the land from hostile invaders, I even more want to be a Wizard who studies arcane lore and possesses secret knowledge. I want to master the hidden workings of the world. Thus the "overweight sometimes triathlete" description in my profile, because for every hour I spend being active I spend many more in sedentary reading and learning. I'm a librarian by profession and in recreation. So I'm sure I have more levels in Wizard than anything else.

My studies have led me to conclude, though, that knowledge of science and the workings of things is not as essential as understanding what makes people tick. So my main focus has been stories, with explorations into art, sociology, psychology, and more. That's where true magic lies. While I'm not much for the performance aspect, I must have a couple levels as a Bard as a story pusher. I even took a detour through seminary and got a beginning level as a Cleric (Master of Divinity degree). I would find it interesting reading my character sheet.

For the present moment, those ruminations are the nature of my farsickness.

Speaking of character sheets, a book I just read for my librarian knowledge was right up my alley for the current moment and included classes, levels, and statistics for its characters. Here's my review.

Homerooms and Hall Passes by Tom O'Donnell

Oh, that was fun. Of course, I was tickled by the concept as clever, but I was afraid it would be a one-joke idea that quickly grew stale. It doesn't. O'Donnell not only does a masterful job of constantly finding new humor to mine from the setup and continuously developing the concept, he manages to tell a well-plotted story with good character development and real emotion. I was pleasantly surprised and delightfully engaged. I definitely recommend this one.

It begins with a group of hardy adventurers from a fantasy realm gathering in the backroom of a tavern for a night of relaxation playing their favorite role-playing game.

In Homerooms & Hall Passes, the players embodied "middle-school students," but the Hall Master was in charge of basically everything else. It was Albiorix's job to plan ahead, set the scene, arbitrate the rules, and most important, make sure everyone was having fun. He'd spend hours every week drawing up maps, planning out challenges, and poring over the countless H&H sourcebooks that filled his satchel.

The module he was currently running was called The Semester of Stultification. In tonight's game, the players would face a daunting series of challenges: a grueling five-paragraph essay dumped on their characters right at the beginning of JADMS Spirit Week. Not to mention an upcoming earth sciences quiz, a concert band recital, a class election, and a big algebra test. To rise to these challenges would take skill, cunning, impeccable time management, and of course a few lucky rolls of the dice. Albiorix chuckled maniacally to himself.

The players sit down to play when an evil curse is activated and they suddenly find themselves within the game, having become the characters they had imagined: a class clown, an overachiever, a loner, and a nerd. And a "new kid," as the game master didn't have a character. They quickly discover it takes more than a high dice roll on a skill check to pass a quiz and algebra problems can't be solved by smashing them with a mighty hammer. They're stuck, and their only hope of survival is not failing the game's goals by succeeding as middle school students. They rise to the challenge and set about figuring out this strange, new world they must now navigate, peers, teachers, administrators, parents, and all.

Game master Albiorix is lucky enough to have been transported with all of his sourcebooks, which he relies on heavily in learning how to get by. Each chapter begins with a short excerpt from one of them, all of which are highly entertaining. There's The Hall Master's Guide, of course, and also The Tome of Teachers, The Codex of Cliques, The Cyclopedia of Students, and more than twenty others, each filled with information and statistics about everything they see.

Though the school day should obviously remain the focus of play, it is important to remember that in Suburbia, school isn't everything. Optometrist appointments, long waits in grocery-store parking lots, flossing before bed--a creative Hall Master can turn such experiences into miniature nonadventures all their own!

Luckily, though the point of H&H is to provide a break from fantasy adventures by immersing players in nonadventures, this book is not the least bit stultifying. It's a tale worth sharing in taverns everywhere.

"Bah!" said Thromdurr. "If a task is easy, it is hardly worth doing. The purest joy in life is meeting great challenges head-on and bludgeoning them into submission. Otherwise the empty feeling returns. Mark my words: I will master earth sciences yet!"

Don't let the empty feeling return.

In my mind, this quote from Mia via Live from Snack Time was said dripping with sarcasm, meant to mock overly sincere adults attempting to inspire the young. While I appreciate that sentiment and her level of imagination in pulling it off, I enjoy it even more as unironic instruction. That's truly creative.

You can be anything you want!

You can be cement, you can be a horse,

you can be a stop sign,

you can be the T in the alphabet.

Be like Mia. Don't be anthropomorphic.

You can be barbed wire eaten by a tree.

It was just Thanksgiving. A strange one, since we didn't gather with family or anyone else. We even socially distanced from our roommate, our kids' honorary uncle who lives in the basement, and ate the meal we shared on different levels of our house.

School and the daycare facility they attend sent them home with Thanksgiving craft projects that included gratitude lists. I only have pictures for two of the four.

That "etc." should have tipped me off that despite doing the exercise a couple of times with others and again at home with us, they couldn't be bothered to really put effort into finding the true mindset of the season. They had the whiniest, fussiest, least grateful Thanksgiving ever. I took a photo of this C3PO caption that captured their attitude perfectly. (We watched A New Hope with them for the first time that evening, by the way.) I'm hoping it was a symptom of living through 2020 and not a habit they're adopting.

We seem to be made to suffer.
It's our lot in life.

One of the efforts I made to help them get into the spirit of the holiday was my attempt to replicate the activities they did at school and daycare. I sat down and made my own gratitude list--off the top of my head, without spending time laboring over it. Here it is:

Sunlight

Wind

The many colors of nature

The changing colors of nature

Spiciness

Stories that make me think

Stories that make me laugh

Stories that make me feel

Words

Music

The laughter of my children

That [elder child] wants to understand how everything works

How [younger] loves to make people happy

Cooking

Walking through the woods

That my wife loves me without judgement

That my wife is my best friend

My wife's intelligence

Chemistry with my wife

Conversations in the car

Sharing the magic of stories

Sharing the joy of knowing

The furriness of cats

The purriness of cats

The playfulness of cats

The devotion of dogs

Exploring wild places with dogs

Melancholy beauty

Community

Compassion

Sharing

Birdsong

I also shared it as a Facebook status that morning without any introduction or context. It was a hit.

This post's title, for the record, is a reference to current events. Park rangers found a ten-foot metal tower in the middle of nowhere and it's been all the rage lately. A few vigilantes removed it after a few days because so many people were driving out to see it, spoiling the natural setting in the process. But not before it could inspire a few copycats in other parts of the world. Here's a headline.

Mysterious Monolith Update: Third Monolith Appears Atop California Mountain

A bit more on current events. This coupling of random AI inspiration and image from InspiroBot is perfect for life in a pandemic.

You are about to turn into a secluded member of the species homo sapiens.

That's a compliment.

But, unlike us, a large majority of Americans went about their regular Thanksgiving traditions, traveling and gathering when they shouldn't have. Covid cases were already surging to record levels before the holiday, and now we're braced for worse.

"As Americans prepare to gather for Thanksgiving,
the world watches with dread and disbelief."

A vaccine may be on the way, but the worst is yet to come.

When your sign is large enough to spell out "equestrian,"
yet doesn't have enough room for "crossing.

As with many of my posts, I want to end with an acknowledgment of the other epidemic taking up space in my mind. I recently came across this and I'm sure it's going to inform the work we do in our library project. I've already added it as a resource on our website that I manage, and it's directly related to a couple of workshops we're planning.

In U.S. Cities, The Health Effects Of Past Housing Discrimination Are Plain To See

In city after city across the U.S., from Milwaukee to Miami, researchers have found a disturbing pattern: People who live in neighborhoods that were once subjected to a discriminatory lending practice called redlining are today more likely to experience shorter life spans – sometimes, as much as 20 or 30 years shorter than other neighborhoods in the same city. . . . 

 . . . these maps, created in the 1930s, classified Black and immigrant communities as risky places to make home loans. They compared the maps to the current economic status and health outcomes in those neighborhoods today and found higher rates of poverty, shorter life spans and higher rates of chronic diseases including asthma, diabetes, hypertension, obesity and kidney disease.

These once-redlined neighborhoods are also more likely to have greater social vulnerability, meaning they're less able to withstand natural and human disasters because of their more limited resources. . . . 

People often think of health as the result of individual choices. But she says the redlining study's findings show how health is also a result of a lack of choices baked into the very fabric of American cities by racist policies made long ago. . . . 

"These are not just racist attitudes. This is policy that is being made by the federal government in these documents," Nelson says. He says redlining didn't create residential segregation but helped cement it, because the practice was a federal policy that set a standard which private lenders followed.

"If you want an example of what systemic or structural racism looks like, you really aren't going to find a better example" than these maps, he says.

The path to justice is a hard one; I'm thankful to be on it.