Steven Harper's Blog, page 51

Darwin's Job

Now that this is all settled, I can write about it publicly.

You can look it up in the papers, and the papers usually have chunks of it wrong.  Here's what happened:

Darwin's police chief in Ypsilanti left, which meant Darwin had to hire someone new.  He farmed out the initial selection process to a company that deals with such things. They winnowed through the applicants and turned a handful back to him for interviews.  One of those was a lieutenant in the Ypsilanti Fire Department.  The Ypsilanti city charter specifically prohibits the council from having input in hiring practices. That's the sole responsibility of the city manager.  But more than once council member illegally let Darwin know they wanted the internal candidate as the new hire.  The internal candidate, however, was absolutely not qualified for the job. He didn't have the required education background, and he additionally had failed to complete course work he had promised to do years earlier.  Darwin also found irregularities in his application.  Meanwhile, a candidate from Livonia applied who had the education, background, and experience the job required.  Darwin offered him the job.  He accepted and signed the contract.

The internal candidate was black.  The Livonia candidate was white.  The councilors who were pressing Darwin to hire the internal candidate were black.

The city council, in a hastily-called closed meeting, told Darwin that he could either resign or be fired.  Officially, he resigned, but we all know it means they fired him.

Darwin and I were both extremely upset.  The city I had lived in for twenty years and which Darwin had come to love had fired him for racist reasons.  I've now become so angry at the council that I can't consider living in Ypsilanti again.  It also ended our friendship with the city's mayor, who refused to stand up for Darwin.  I can't stand the sight of her, and she should hang her head in shame.

However, Darwin negotiated a separation settlement from Ypsilanti. The council resisted at first, but in the end they knew that if Darwin sued them for discrimination and for violation of contract, they'd lose, and badly.  So they handed it over.

Darwin started a job hunt right away.  Several weeks went by, but he got no nibbles from the applications he sent out.  He was getting worried that fallout from Ypsilanti was following him, despite the fact that he had fielded several phone calls from people in city management who told him flat-out that everyone in the municipal community knew Ypsilanti had treated him badly.  I told him the lack of calls arose from it being summer time--too many people on vacation to get much done.  Still, he worried.

In the meantime, he hung around the house.  This was strangely difficult.  I love Darwin deeply, but having him home every minute was strangely wearing.  It did mean we could eat supper at a decent hour (Darwin often gets home after 7:00 PM, making it difficult to eat together), but he was a relentless presence around the house, and it wasn't something I was used to.  I began to understand stay-at-home wives who spent their entire marriage alone during the day in an arrangement that made everyone happy until the husband retired and found himself not knowing what to do with himself all day at home.  Such husbands are notorious for following their wives around like lost puppies, driving everyone nuts until a new equilibrium is established.  Darwin didn't follow me around all summer, but he was indeed around all the time, and neither of us quite knew how to respond to that.

Darwin applied at some places in our general area.  He also applied at places farther away, and even some that were out-of-state.  One city in Connecticut expressed a great deal of interest in him as a candidate, and they were enthusiastic to the point that we were eyeing houses and working out logistics, and then suddenly all contact with them ended.  Weeks and weeks went by.  Nothing.  They hadn't hired anyone else, either.  (Several months later, they finally hired an internal candidate, but they still never contacted Darwin again.)

Our plan, if Darwin got a job far away, was that he would move to the new town and I would stay in Wherever until Max graduated, since he's in his senior year.  Then I would take an early retirement, sell the house, and move out with him.

The summer passed slowly.  I went on the exchange trip to Germany and returned.  Still no interviews or offers.  Right around the time Darwin was getting seriously unhappy, he got a call to interview in Albion.

More coming . . .

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Speaking in Ann Arbor

A while ago I was invited to speak to a writers group in Ann Arbor, and I accepted.  Giving speeches or workshops to adults (instead of recalcitrant teenagers) is usually fun and a good excuse to meet new people.  So off I went.

I gave my interactive workshop about avoiding cliches.  I use Google Slides with Pear Deck, which makes the show interactive.  Yesterday evening, however, when I was booting up my laptop to download the slides to it, my laptop totally crashed.  And burned.  And exploded.  And disintegrated.  Yipes!

Darwin has TWO laptops, so I grabbed one of those.  It asked for a fingerprint or password.  I don't have the fingerprint, and I don't know the password.  I called Darwin to ask--he's out of town this week--and he said he had no idea what the password is, since he always uses the fingerprint.  The other laptop is for his job, and he didn't feel it was a good idea to let me use it.  Well, great.

So today I grabbed my own work laptop from my desk and brought it home.  It's a pain to disconnect and reconnect everything (seriously--it's easier to disconnect Brainiac from his spaceship), but I had little choice. 

The workshop ("The Paradox of Cliches") was held in the meeting room at Crazy Wisdom Bookstore.  I love Crazy Wisdom.  It's the best bookstore in the whole world.  It smells of incense, sage, and paper, and in addition to selling an amazing selection of books, it sells the most wonderful collection of Pagan and New Age and Wiccan and Buddhist and Hindu and Every Other Spirituality Stuff.  Little goddess statues and mediation tools and prayer bells and tea sets and home made soap and . . . and . . . and . . . It's my favorite store in Ann Arbor, and it's always a joy to return there.

Upstairs, CW has a tea shop and a meeting room.  I trotted upstairs with my borrowed laptop and found Cliff, the event coordinator.  In a few minutes, we'd connected my laptop to a projector while participants wandered in.  There were about 15 or so people, a nice turnout.  I got Slides going, and started up.

It was awful.  Seriously.  I was way off my game.  I stuttered and stammered and blithered.  I couldn't seem to focus or keep myself together.  I got through it somehow.  The Q&A afterward generated several questions, which usually means people were listening, and several people told me they enjoyed it and learned a lot, but I was feeling like I should have been a great deal better.  I told myself on the way back to the car that everyone gets a misfire now and then.  Still, I dissected my performance mercilessly and made a list of what to do better next time.

At least I got to shop at Crazy Wisdom.

Then I called Darwin to make myself feel better, got home, and made a smoothie.  :)

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Cooking in Germany

We have more of my journal from Germany last July:

COOKING WITH FRIENDS

As I’ve occasionally (only occasionally) mentioned in this journal, I enjoy cooking. When Christina and her then-boyfriend (now fiancé) Timo stayed with us during the American end of the exchange, it turned out Christina was an avid cook as well, and we shared dinner-making chores, teaching other different recipes from our respective countries. [Ed., Christina and Timo are now married. Yay! It's been wonderful seeing their relationship progress from dating to engaged to married.]

Now that I’m in Germany, Christina invited me over to cook together at her and Timo’s place, and I avidly accepted. 

But first I had to get there.

Our plan was simple. I’d hop the train for their apartment and be there around 6:00. Timo gets home from work at about 7:00, so we’d have time to hit the grocery store and get supper going before he arrived. 

None of us counted on a very sad stranger.

A woman whose name wasn’t released to the press was apparently suffering from deep depression, because she jumped from a bridge over a set of tracks and died immediately.   An entire section of the railway shut down so the authorities could handle the situation. 

At the time, I knew nothing about this. I only knew that the train stopped at one station and stayed there. Eventually, the conductor announced we all had to disembark due to a problem on the tracks.

Grumbling and muttering, all the passengers left the train. I was barely halfway to my destination and had no idea how to get there. I texted Christina to update her, and she offered to come get me. 

I waited patiently. In America, I’m generally an impatient waiter. Hey, I’m a busy guy and every moment I spend waiting is wasted, right? But in Europe, I turn into a patient waiter. I’m perfectly content to examine sewer gratings or count subway bricks. Then I get back to America, and I’m impatient again.

At last Christina arrived. We’d already run into each other several times at school, but we still hugged in greeting, and it was a joy to see her again. Still, we were considerably behind on our schedule. I had planned to make Phony Lasagna, a sort-of lasagna casserole that’s a family favorite, but it’s a 90-minute project at least. Christina and I headed into a grocery store to discuss the matter.

Another switch for me: at home, I loathe grocery shopping. I hate everything about it, from planning the menu to making the list to fighting the crowd to putting groceries away at home. But in Germany, grocery shopping becomes fun. The store is full of interesting and unfamiliar products, or ways to present products. I scamper around the store like Rikki Tikki Tavi on speed, examining everything in chef mode.  The milk has a different percentage of fat than in America. The variety of cheese is much wider. Check out these odd vegetable combinations in the canned section. And CHOCOLATE! 

After some discussion, Christina and I decided to make chili. We selected ingredients—yes, we put meat in ours—and I double-checked with her for a spice list. She had everything we needed in that category already. She suggested putting corn in the chili, which isn’t normally an ingredient for me, but I agreed to it, and why not?

Just as we were leaving, Timo called. He was stuck in the same shutdown and was, in fact, at the same station I had been stranded at half an hour ago. However, the transportation system was sending a series of special buses to route people around the problem area, so no need to come get him.

Since Christina had taught me some German recipes back home, it was my turn to teach her my chili recipe. My secret ingredient is a big dash of curry with a fair amount of pepper.  Christina worked on a custard dessert with a chocolate center. We had a great time, cooking and chatting and catching up. (I got to see her wedding dress, which Timo, of course, hadn’t seen at all.) 

At last Timo arrived. He had a deep suntan, to my surprise—last fall he’d been very fair.  More hugs and happy chatter! A lot of it was about their upcoming wedding, which is taking place in a castle, and their honeymoon in Greece. 

The chili finally finished. I served it with a cheese plate and some interesting spiced crackers Christina found at the store. It was all delicious. Christina and Timo were enthusiastic. The chocolate/custard dessert was a perfect sweet end after the spicy chili.

We talked quite a lot and killed a bottle Diet Coke among us. (Wine? Pff!)  They actually had ice (!!!), and I got my caffeine as cold as I like it.

In the end, I had to get back “home,” and Timo offered to drive me so we could talk a little more, too, and that was very fine. It was a wonderful evening of cooking with friends, and exactly what an exchange is supposed to be about.

COOKING FOR FRIENDS

Since I’m staying with JK and AK and they feed me regularly, I felt I should cook for them at least once. I thought I’d make for them something fun and new. In this case, my weirdo combination of cordon bleu and chicken Kiev.

“I will need to be a little rude,” I joked, “and rifle your kitchen to see what equipment you have.”

This also started with a trip to the grocery store and inspired more Rikkti Tikki Tavi scampering about, this time assembling bread crumbs and chicken breasts and cucumbers and corn (which I couldn’t find frozen; only canned, for some reason).  Earlier that day, I had already visited a street farmer’s market and picked up potatoes.

In the kitchen, I set to work. It was interesting and fun to use someone else’s kitchen to cook in. AK got home from work in the middle of it and asked when supper would be ready. When I told him it would be about half an hour, he looked a bit surprised, but AK does most of the cooking in the household, and he often doesn’t get home from work until seven or later, so they’re used to eating at eight or even nine—quite normal in Germany, but a little startling to Americans.

I discovered the chicken breasts (pre-packaged) weren’t in large pieces as they usually come in America, but were a lot of much smaller fillets. This only stymied me for a moment—I decided on the spot to make a whole bunch of smaller servings than fewer large ones.

I oiled the chicken fillets with sunflower oil and rolled them around cheese and ham, then rolled =that= in breadcrumbs. They went into the oven (carefully checked for Celsius temperature). After that, I boiled and mashed the potatoes (their set of beaters caused me some consternation, but I got it sorted out) and made Ukrainian salad out of cucumbers, sunflower oil, and salt, then heated the corn.

Everything came out deliciously, and AK and JK were very impressed.  It was fun!

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More Heidelberg

Whoo! I've been neglecting the blog lately. Life's been exploding in all directions. More details on that later. For now, we have more of the Germany summer trip:

MORE HEIDELBERG

After finishing Darwin's family research at the Heidelberg University library, I joined up with the students for a nice tour on a solar-powered boat down the river. We coasted by wonderful old houses and flats that dated back hundreds of years. And we visited the baboon on the bridge. The main bridge in Heidelberg has always had a statue of a monkey and two mice on it. No one knows why. The animals have been destroyed (by accident or design) several times, but they always get replaced. The baboon is . . .er. . .obviously male, a tradition of the bridge baboons. The baboon is holding a mirror because reasons, and if you touch it, you’ll be in for money. Touch the mice for fertility, and the baboon’s fingers for good luck. In older times, you touched the baboon’s male attributes for luck, but that’s changed in more recent times.

I also visited the Lutheran church in the center of the city. European city churches are always huge, echoing, vaulted spaces, and this one was plainly done. The Catholics go in for heavy ornament, but the Protestants are more plain. They go for while walls, an uncovered blocky altar with a few carvings on the corners, and wooden chairs instead of pews.

This particular church let you climb the tower for a two Euro donation. I paid it and headed up, up, up a one-person spiral staircase. This took me to the choir loft, where I found a touch of whimsy—a three-foot-tall Lego figure of Martin Luther, holding a plastic quill and brandishing his list of theses.

To continue, I had to cross the loft to another spiral staircase that went up, up, up to another loft with a tiny chapel in it that included for unknown reasons a life-sized crucifix. (This was a Protestant church, remember.) I crossed to yet another staircase that went up, up, up, up and UP. The ceiling came down so low, I had to crouch. And then I was through a small iron gate and on a balcony that ran round the top of the church, just below the bells. The entire city of Heidelberg stretched out far, far below. The Ruin looked down from above, and the mountains lay in the further distance. It was magnificent, and it’s what I love doing most in Europe.

Back downstairs, I bought some fantastic German ice cream and window shopped until it was time to go home.

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Grave Matters

Remember that news story a few years back about the ancient Roman grave with two people holding hands? Everyone instantly dubbed them lovers. Now, however, the two people have been identified as male, and suddenly all the scientists are twisting themselves into knots to explain how they couldn't possibly be gay. Lots of graves have been uncovered with a man and a woman buried together holding hands, and no one questioned the idea that they're married or lovers. But let it be two men, and suddenly it's "they were probably comrades-in-arms" or "they were brothers or cousins." Sure. Strangely, no one says the same thing about the male/female pairings.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/hand-holding-lovers-of-modena-skeletons-are-male-20190913-p52qx4.html



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stevenpiziks @ 2019-09-13T18:42:00

Remember that news story a few years back about the ancient Roman grave with two people holding hands? Everyone instantly dubbed them lovers. Now, however, the two people have been identified as male, and suddenly all the scientists are twisting themselves into knots to explain how they couldn't possibly be gay. Lots of graves have been uncovered with a man and a woman buried together holding hands, and no one questioned the idea that they're married or lovers. But let it be two men, and suddenly it's "they were probably comrades-in-arms" or "they were brothers or cousins." Sure. Strangely, no one says the same thing about the male/female pairings.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/hand-holding-lovers-of-modena-skeletons-are-male-20190913-p52qx4.html



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Ghosts!

I have a new story up at Curious Fictions: https://curiousfictions.com/stories/2525-steven-harper-ghosts-from-an-enchanter-fleeing

What happens when a necromancer gets woke?

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Germany: More School and Heidelberg

Monday was another school day. KL and I let the students have at while we bummed around downtown Esslingen. I could do this every day, thanks.

The next day the students and teachers took a trip to Heidelberg. We bustled down to the train station and hopped aboard an ICE train for a three-hour ride which I still enjoyed, thank you.

Heidelberg is an old, old city that was largely untouched by World War II. It’s a medium-sized town at the bottom of a valley on the banks of the Neckar River (which also flows through Esslingen). It’s the quintessential German city, with narrow, cobblestone streets, unexpected churches, little markets, and a world-class university. Looming over the whole place is The Ruin.  The Ruin is a ruined castle that was built and inhabited only a short time before a war blasted it into semi-rubble. It’s been partly restored, but largely left as a ruin and something about it looks incredibly romantic and poetic, which is why it hasn’t been fully rebuilt. It’s a stunning site. Heidelberg is probably my favorite place in Germany, and if I won the lottery, I would give serious consideration to living there.

The students were given time to explore. Me, I had my own agenda.

See, Darwin has been doing genealogy for decades and, like most genealogists, he has a few stopping points—ancestors he can’t get past. One ancestor is Graf (Count) Johann (Johannes/John) Damon (Dammon/Daymon/Daman). Darwin can’t find his parents, a necessary step for going farther back on his tree. 

However, family legend says he studied at the University of Heidelberg in the early 1800s, when the Napoleanic Wars pulled him out of school. Eventually he made his way to the United States. I was going to find out more about him.

My main goal was to find out if it would be worth searching more for him in Heidelberg. See, I only had about an hour, and I was fairly sure that if the records existed, they would be scanned from hand-written pages and saved as photos or PDFs. Early 19th century hand-written German is a bitch to read. You have to know, for example, if what looks an f is actually an f, an s, or even ss. Capital letters are florid and difficult to distinguish from one another. V and W look much the same. So I was fairly sure that finding Daman in any existing records would be a difficult and careful hunt, which I couldn’t do in just an hour. I wanted to learn if it would be worth it for Darwin and me to return later. 

I located the university library with my iPhone and discovered it was only a short walk from the meeting point for the students. Yay! I hiked through Heidelberg’s horrifyingly delightful streets to the massive stone library, which is conveniently located across the street from an equally massive church built of pink sandstone. I had settled on the library as a more likely place to store old records than, say, the registrar’s office.

Inside, I found an information desk, where a Very Helpful Lady sat me down and asked me what I needed. I told her. She settled her glasses on her nose and started clicking keys. I was a little worried that my request would be greeted with a semi-huffy, “I can only help you a little,” but not at all. I had just handed a librarian a research puzzle, you see, and most of them live for this kind of thing, including the Very Helpful Lady.

A second monitor that faced me mirrored what she was doing, which was very useful. She called up a number of records sites, and it turned out I had been right—the early 1800s records were PDFs of old books. Printed or typed records didn’t start until the 1830s, long after Daman would have been a student. They definitely had the records, and the VHL perused a few of them to see if Daman’s name cropped up. In the meantime, she fired questions at me (but very nicely). Did he earn his doctorate? (No, he didn’t even graduate.) Do you know what he studied? (No.) Do you know what religion he was? (Protestant.) 

I also called poor Darwin, who was dead asleep at 4 AM back home, to get more clarification on some points. (Hey, this was the only chance to do this search with on-site help. Sacrifices must be made.) He scared up a little more information and answers to the questions, but not a whole lot. Most of it was, as I said, family legend, and wasn’t official knowledge.

Rather than become frustrated by the skimpy information, the VHL became more interested. Could we find him? She suggested that, since he was born a count, that we check the city records at Kassel, where he was born. Records of nobility were more carefully preserved. We should also check at churches for birth, baptism, and marriage records, since we know his religion. And she showed me a bunch of places where such records were already digitized and available on-line. (Although Darwin is adept at searching web archives, American search engines often ignore European archive sites, and without a URL, he didn’t know where to look.)

In the end, I came away with a whole bunch of leads, including the tantalizing idea that his original (pre-Amercan) name may have been Jacques, since there was a Jacque Daman from Belgium who served under Napoleon, was injured at Waterloo, and attended university at Heidelberg. Darwin doesn’t think he’s the right person, but it’s worth following up on. And we have the other archives to search now.

I thanked the VHL effusively for her time, and she seemed pleased. So it was a good day for all!

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Tropes! We Got Tropes!

I'm reading a fair amount of fiction with gay main characters these days, and I'm ready to smack the authors and publishers upside the head. Why? Stupid tropes.

A big part of much of this fiction (especially YA fiction) is the Coming Out Moment. I'm not opposed to having a Coming Out Moment. But I'm opposed to the stupid tropes about it. Specifically:

TROPE #1: The LGBT person comes out to a friend or family member and expects a bad reaction. The friend/family member explodes in anger. "How could you? Why would you do this to me? How dare you?" and the reader is supposed to think, "Oh geez--the poor main character. Now we'll see if s/he has the strength to deal with this." But then, in an amazing plot twist, the friend/family member says, "I'm angry because you didn't tell me sooner! Didn't you trust me?" And it turns out the friend/family member is actually supportive after all.

I despise this trope. First, it isn't in the slightest bit realistic. Second, it's been used over and over and over and over and over. And over. It's like watching a movie with a time bomb in it. There's no suspense whatsoever because we know the bomb will be defused. There's no shock or suspense in this trope because we know what the friend/family member will end up saying. Third, it's damaging. NO ONE has the right to decide when someone else comes out. NO ONE is allowed to decide for someone else that another person is trustworthy with this kind of information. How dare =you= be angry when I've lived my entire life trying second- and third-guess everyone around me about this issue? Fuck you. It's bad writing, it's boring, and it's damaging. It's not suspenseful or amusing or cute.

TROPE #2: The LGBT person comes out to a parent, who immediately shouts for joy. "Oh, I'm so happy for you!" the parent gushes.  "Yay! You're gay! You know, Myra has a son who's gay. Maybe you two could date! I want to throw a coming out party for you. Let's pick out some outfits." This one is meant to be a reversal on the more expected response of disappointment, fear, or even hatred. The problem is, like the one above, it's been done and done and done and done. It also makes the parent (usually a mom) look like a complete ditz. Finally, the parent is dismissing the entire event by making light of it. The teen has just done something very person and very powerful, and the parents reacts like a five-year-old being told they're going to Disneyland, which diminishes and infantilizes the news. The author again means to be different and cool, but it's cliche and stupid, and it makes me throw the book across the room.

We have the obligatory plug. If you want to see a much better handling of the coming out, read THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING KEVIN.




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Pasta Restored!

On the advice of my friend Tammy Coxen, I tracked down CarbaNada noodles--low-carb flat noodles. I discovered Meijer sells them, and while they're about three times more expensive than regular pasta, it's way easier to buy them than undergo the complicated process of making my own low-carb pasta. Best of all, they have the same taste and texture of regular flat noodles.

I made a couple of pasta dishes with CarbaNada noodles, and not only did they taste the same, they didn't spike Darwin's sugar. Total win! Darwin can eat pasta again! One of Darwin's favorite recipes is Sweetie's Macaroni and Cheese (https://www.justapinch.com/…/p…/sweetie-pies-mac-cheese.html), but it's on his strictly forbidden list. I made it with the Carba-Nada noodles. He tried it and we watched his sugar levels carefully afterward. Not a peep. Darwin was overjoyed! This is why he has declared Tammy a food goddess.

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