The Sea from Different Shores

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The sea in Hawaii is as green as it is blue and rides onto mounds of golden sand, molded by the feet of passerby who carry their shoes and roll up their jeans. Waves overlap waves like sheets of ice floating on the Antarctic sea, sliding over one another like clouds. The sea leaves behind flowers of foam on the sand, which dissolve under the heat of the sun. At dusk, the sea sings the colors of the sunset, purple and red and hazel under balmy skies. The sea in Hawaii sparkles in moonlight and rolls in the breezes of the night. It rocks itself to sleep, as the wind whispers its breathless coo.

Years ago, I threw a bottle with a message into the sea.

 

The sea only reaches Tacoma through the Puget Sound and maybe through some rivers. On the rocky, black-sand shore of the sound, crabs scurry into crevices between stones, carrying with them the detritus of the sea. Tongues of seaweed wash ashore, covered in slime, where they harden slowly under the mild sun. The water of the Puget Sound drops fragments of shells and crabs onto the sand, where they remain half-buried, like the statue of Ozymandias in the desert. But the shore of Tacoma is not a desolate place. The Puget Sound is quiet, and birds rest on the wooden pillars of piers that have known older days. I think that, if I were any good at it, I could skip a rock that would hop infinitely by feeding on the stillness of the sea.

 

I think of these things as I sit in the SUB, alone at a table with five other seats. I’m holding a bottle of soda to my ear and listening to the sea inside of it. At times it sounds like the sea in Hawaii and at others the waves of the Puget Sound, which I suppose, for all their differences, don’t sound that different. Maybe the sea is getting back to me, in response to the message I tossed it years ago. But I don’t know what it’s trying to say, and my friends take their seats, so I lower my bottle and leave the waves for another time.

Against the Current

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Toward the end of my summer vacation, over late-night frozen yogurt, I had a conversation with a friend about how it feels to always be leaving and returning home, for and from school. We were sitting at a table overlooking a marina and watching the water reflect the starlight. Boats bobbed on the current, the water lapping their sides. Two years removed from high school, I feel more than ever a sense of distance from the things that I associate with home—the people and places I knew, and the memories. If home is a place constituted by memories, then home must be ever elusive, a place that necessarily exists in the past, and therefore unreachable. I told my friend, “When I came home this summer, I felt less like I was returning to something real and more like I was returning to a memory.” My friend sympathized. He said, “Even though I live here, the times I feel closest to home are the times when I’m away and remembering it.”

The next day, I drove to my childhood school, which is nestled in a valley between mountains that are a thousand shades of green. When I got there, it was raining, so I parked underneath some trees. I leaned against the window and watched the rain drip from the branches onto the windshield of the car. The rain slid down the window, etching rivulets into the glass and running shadows onto the dashboard. I watched a man drive a lawn mower over the grass, and the grass bent and cracked beneath the blades. Then a bell rang and doors opened and children ran onto the blacktop basketball court with balls and jump ropes and Chinese jacks. And for a moment, I realized that, though I wasn’t, my memories had led me back to a place that I had known in a previous time.

Summer

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I spent most of my summer at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, where I read, researched, and wrote an essay about Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous novel 2666. My research was funded by the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHSS) summer research program, which allowed me to sit in a library all-day, doing things that I love to do. For me, this entailed reading a challenging, but rewarding, novel and what a bunch of people much smarter than I had to say about the novel, and writing to seem much smarter than I am about a novel that is much smarter than I. The project was an exercise in independent learning, and I recommend the program to any student with a desire to do something intellectually stimulating over the three-month summer break. (There is a similar research program for students interested in research in mathematics and the natural sciences.) The great thing about the program is that the student has full creative control, choosing everything from the scope of the project to its end product. This is how I was able to write about the book of a Chilean who may never be taught in an undergraduate class. The program also posts completed projects to Sound Ideas, the online repository for Puget Sound students and faculty, and so represents a publication opportunity. I will be presenting a poster on my research at the AHSS symposium in Collins Memorial Library later this semester, alongside the 27 or so other AHSS summer research scholars, whose projects are ambitious, sophisticated, and meritorious.

When I was not writing and reading for my research project, I was writing and reading for fun. To celebrate a friend’s birthday, I put together a collection of poems that my friend and I had written over the past year or so. Using a publishing program called Blurb Bookwright, I printed the collection and had it bound in hardcover. I fancied the book by including professional-quality pictures from an online, attribution-free photography website called Pixabay (which also has nice wallpaper photos). The book featured twenty poems, ten of my friend’s and ten of mine, and a foreword and afterword (which were extraneous, to be sure, but gave the book some credibility) written by two other friends of ours. Needless to say, my friend liked the gift.

I did a modest amount of reading outside of my research. Of the books that I read, my favorites were Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, a smart, dizzying rumination on the ideas of chaos and order, and Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, which is written with the audacity and power characteristic of Nabokov. I recommend both—and 2666 while I’m at it—though neither is exactly palatable, which, I believe, is the point. I also, at the beginning of the summer, received a signed-copy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant as part of a pre-order special through Barnes and Noble. I must have spent as much time examining Ishiguro’s signature as I did reading the book. His signature is plain, like his prose, which I think is fitting. It is also tilted, as if behind the cleanliness sits an unreliable narrator, with a tilted smile. Opening the book to Ishiguro’s signature made the reading that followed more personal, and throughout the novel I found myself flipping back to the title page, as if the signature constituted an interpretive key to the book. In the end, I suppose, it served only to mock.

I have talked for long about my summer, when in fact I never strayed from the library. My summer didn’t take me to many new places, as some of my friends’ summers did (Spain, China, New York), but it did challenge me to envision all of these places through books, and it did enable me to learn a few things along the way.

On the Road

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In late May, two weeks after the school year drew down, I drove south from the San Juan Islands to my home in the Bay Area. The drive, fourteen hours with an overnight intermission in Eugene, OR, began a journey on which I planned to drive quite a lot: some ten-thousand miles all told, on a trip that would neatly circumnavigate the country. The while, I would be researching state energy policy. It was a sponsored trip, a university research grant doled out in a single check for the amount of $2,750. An additional stimulus of $500 was to come at the end of the summer, as soon as I had submitted my research and earned the money.

In June and July, I worked my way from California to New York, beetling by a circuitous route across nineteen states and over thousands of miles of backroad highway. My trip plunged, first, into the sunstroked American southwest. Abbey country: Utah and Colorado, where landscapes are scrubbed Desert Solitaire pinks and purples and where, perhaps by some southwestern ordinance, every bookstore seemed made to own at least one signed copy*.

Sunset (not so pink) in Joshua Tree, CA, the last California stop before true SW.

Sunset in Joshua Tree, CA, the last California stop before the true SW.

As a guy who’s only ever lived by a body of coastal water (at the very least by a sound) I was beginning, somewhere in Utah, to go a bit crazy from the dryness. So, like a thirsty migratory bird, I winged my way northeast, stopping first in Texas before traveling up through the soggy South. Misssissippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas. State by state I absorbed then sweated back out the monsoon humidity of the region, the annual baptism of the South in mid-summer.

I arrived in New York in early August, days unshowered and tanner than ever, my skin crisped a yellow mud color. I had spent most nights** sleeping on the road in the back of my Subaru, a stalwart hatchback of some 200k+ miles whose back seats I had replaced with a platform bed. Four nights on a couch in a friend’s NY apartment, then, felt sadly palatial. The couch was not even very comfortable; it was simply not located in the back of my car.

Wheel

The worn leather of an old wheel.

Four nights were all I had in New York. A nagging internal voice kept reminding me that certain parts of my research were yet-undone. I needed to get home, but I was on the wrong coast.

After some ribbing, I convinced another friend, Robin, to make the drive home with me across the three-thousand-mile width of the U.S.-of-A. We would travel through: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin (briefly), Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and, finally, Washington. In Washington we would stop, stay for a week before driving south to California.

As an aside, I have known Robin nearly my entire life. Our mothers met in a pre-natal group when we were yet unborn. We grew up together, in proximity until he moved to the East Coast in the first grade. We have managed a close friendship since then, upkept by summer visits and an annual backpacking trip.

The smell of gasoline in the morning.

The NY-WA stretch was, is, a long one. According to google maps, the drive alone would require just over forty- three hours of car time. We figured another twenty for sleep/gas/bathroom stops. A ratio of 3-1, driving-to-not-driving. Respectable and manageable. The notion of such speed across such distance had, we thought, a certain sex appeal about it. The appeal of crazy endurance, of comfort foregone for greater speed. Of two rugged dudes racing the very sunset across the spine of the country—of the evening redness in the West—of the lonely flatness of the American interior—of something like that.

Highway Morning

Morning on 90-W: The lonely flatness of the American interior.

And how better to transmit all that steam, we thought, than by an Instagram account?

On the 13th of August, departure day, we make the account. At precisely 1500hr (auspicious because it is the exact time we had planned to leave, which never happens) we pull out from Robin’s driveway. Our first post is a picture of my car with a sentimental caption, and it is yet fresh as we merge onto Interstate 84-W.

Robin takes first shift behind the wheel—first of many, many—and I look out the window, scouring our surroundings for second-post-worthy content. Something exciting, something sexy. I find very little of this: road signs with graphics a touch silly; advertisements one could not imagine would work on anyone; all sorts of funny looking humans, our fellow travelers. But nothing remarkable.

In the aggregate, spoken of in elevated terms—“thousands-of-miles,” “number-of- states”—our journey promised to be grand indeed. Peering around at the highway, no particular thing seemed worthy of it.

Really, though (to be ponderous and altogether less fun), no journey is taken in the aggregate. The aggregate, after all, is an aftereffect; a glittering highlight reel that requires the forgetting of lots of unsexy things—speed limit signs, off-ramps never taken, one-pump stations in anonymous, sad little towns. The aggregate is a retrospective deal. It is only in retrospect that a huge stretch of common driving—a series of McMuffins, refuels, farts—can take on the high romantic quality of the trip, the quest: of the Big, Sexy Journey.

We bought dinner here, sandwiches: two patties, a piece of roast beef, nothing else.

We bought dinner here: two patties, a piece of roast beef, nothing else (no mustard, even!).

The journey (the Big, Sexy Journey (BSJ)) is the story of whatever you want it to be. You can be who you want, on the BSJ, so long as you have a good imagination and are creative with your camera, pen, etc.

Perhaps on the BSJ you are a drifter type. The BSJ is for you the story of a rambler. You are a study in hip, chilled-out nonchalance. Neck bandanna’d, man-bun pinned up sloppy, obscure tee dusty from the wear-’n’-tear of the road, your vibes are alive, on the BSJ, and resonating in all the right ways.

Otherwise on the BSJ you are a wandering sage, a poet taking the temperature of the Heartland. Or else the BSJ is more cynical: You are a sneering anthropologist, gathering about you a sneering ethnography of the towns (cultural voids) along the highways linking East Coast to West-.

Robin and I finish our drive, 3,012 miles in total, in fifty-three hours, arriving in northern Washington a bit more than two days after departing from New York. We do this by stopping exactly nowhere interesting, except twice in South Dakota—once at the Badlands Nat’l Park and again at Mount Rushmore.

The Badlands National Park, South Dakota.

The Badlands National Park, South Dakota.

If we had taken more time for own Big, Sexy Journey, perhaps it would have been sexier than it turned out to be. But our BSJ was flaccid indeed. These inane things, among other inane things, comprised it: fifteen gas stations, 1/3 of Steven King’s The Stand audiobook (a 62-hour-long beast), and a nearly constant patter of dull but diverting conversation.

When we turned off the engine for the last time in The Evergreen State, our Instagram account was populated by exactly one more photo than it’d been when we’d left The Empire. The new addition was a picture of a dusky, alien landscape in the Badlands, SD, the only really remarkable shot taken during the entire trip. Not shown: three-thousand miles of westbound highway 90.

Not shown, at least, until now.

Somewhere in Ohio (or was it Pennsylvania?), I started to shoot footage. Mostly from the passenger-side window. Of passing trees, passing cars, the passing road. A gas station. A rest stop. Another gas station. Another gas station. Another gas station…

Another gas station...

Another gas station.

After working the footage for a couple of days, I made a film of the trip. Having never made a film, this project was a bit out of my wheelhouse, but nevertheless fun to do. The agenda of the film (that is to say the agenda of its creator, of me) included all the usual goals of travel stories: to relay some version of the truth—to make a narrative at once universal and unique—to tell a story.

Yes, this: to tell a story: to string bits and pieces—images, noises, scenes—together into something more than a mere collection of parts.

What departs our travel story from the typical one is the nature of the parts we did collect, those which made the final cut. If other travel stories have a range of parts—some smooth and some sharp, fun because the collection is so eclectic—ours is like a bucket of wing nuts: repetitive, hard to lift, possibly beginning to rust from last week’s rain.

This film focuses on the parts of the drive usually cut from the journey. It lingers for sometimes uncomfortable durations (in mimic of a real drive) on the stretches where absolutely nothing of note happened at all.

This film is very boring; that is basically the point. I hope you enjoy it, though I expect you to not.

*I had left my copy (unsigned) at home and, though I’d already read it, I bought a new one out of a weird feeling of peer pressure, only to not pick it up once over the following months.

**—with the exception of an unmentionable two in Jackson, MI, when the air had been so palpably wet that I caved, rented a motel room and watched Grimm, perhaps the all-time worst show, late into the night.

Field Mouse

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       A few weeks ago I stood atop Stora Klif, the highest point on Heimaey Island with three friends. It was day four of our ten-day Iceland Georney, a biennial field trip to some of the world’s most geologically unique places planned by the UPS geology department. We gazed out over the small island, which was affected by a volcanic eruption in 1973. Heimaey is the only inhabited island in the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago, so when the eruption occurred all the residents had to evacuate while their town was partially destroyed by the lava flow. The lava spewing from the Eldfell Caldera slowly added landmass to the island and threatened to close off the only harbor by advancing into the chilly waters of the North Atlantic. In order to save the island’s fishing industry, the Icelandic people sprayed water on the marginal edge of the flow and cooled the steaming lava (read John McPhee’s The Control of Nature if you want more details). As a result of this great effort, the harbor was left exposed to the open ocean and the fishing could resume. The lava stopped advancing and cooled into solid rock. From our vantage point on Stora Klif, you could clearly see the newest lava flow locked in time until repeated wave action, perhaps for a million years, inevitably erodes it away into sand.

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The view from halfway up Stora Kliff.  The village and harbor can be seen, as well as the 1973 lava flow and the Eldfell volcano above the town. 

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A multicolored volcanic “bomb” from the 1973 eruption. 

         After returning from Iceland, my work as a summer researcher began. I am working with professor Kena Fox-Dobbs and several other researchers from universities scattered across the country. This National Science Foundation project seeks to understand climate and environmental change with different chemical tools and proxies. I traveled to the Meade Basin of southwestern Kansas, where Claude Hibbard first cataloged one of the most fossil-rich sites in North America. Everywhere we collected samples it took only a few minutes of searching to find fossilized bone and teeth falling out of the ancient soil. Fossil research in this area has occurred for seventy years and it was not until recently that research produced more questions than the assemblage of fossils could answer. The current Meade team works with Bob Martin, who knows the area and its fossil sites better than Hibbard himself. Thanks to his hard work and good standing with the local landowners, our team is seeking to answer some of the questions that have arisen in studying changes in the animal communities.   Through studying different snapshots of time in the surrounding units of soil, we hope to collect data that can reflect the environmental conditions that caused these changes. My goal is to collect soil samples with great enough resolution in order to tell a story of plant life on the surface for the last 5 million years. From previous studies within the Great Plains, we know that the modern grassland ecosystem in North America evolved around this time.

       Working with the Meade team in the field was one of the hottest and most spectacular weeks of my life. The whole group is made up of some really great people, who like being outside, talking science, and enjoy one another’s company. While digging in dirt all day in 90° heat without shade, might not seem like a spectacular way to spend one’s summer, it was the people that made the fieldwork such a joy for me. It was interesting to observe how everyone with their own projects and goals in mind could find a way to work efficiently in the field and truly enjoy the work. Being an undergrad surrounded by PhDs, post docs, and graduate professors was intimidating at first. However, I quickly learned that while the PIs were very intelligent they were also down to earth and willing to answer any stupid question I was stupid enough to ask.

        In Meade and on Heimaey we were oblivious to what was occurring in the outside world. We took the time to appreciate the Earth and its many incredible processes. While we stared at a lava flow frozen in time or logged the paleosol horizons in Borcher’s Badlands, we were not wrapped up in the present, with thoughts of our families, world events, and celebrities, but we were people gazing into the past. In Meade, we trenched the soil that camels and rhinos walked upon, that saber-toothed cats peed on. We don’t yet have the ability to travel through time, and probably never will. However, the rocks and soils that make up the mountains, cliffs and ground under our feet give us snapshots into the past. The Meade project is trying to develop tools that will get us pretty darn close to knowing exactly what the environment looked like and ultimately enable others to use these tools in other areas. The more that is known about this time and place, the more it is apparent that we don’t know much at all. Such is science. Through a greater understanding of the world’s past ecosystems, climate, and species, we can better understand how our current landscape came to be, and figure out where the Earth is headed.

P.S.

Many mornings in Kansas were spent wrangling small rodents, cataloging them, and taking hair samples to determine their diets. The Onychomys was a common sight. I developed a new appreciation for these stubborn, aggressive, smelly creatures. This video sheds some light on the simultaneous beauty and brawn of the mighty grasshopper mouse.

Keep an eye out for my next entry I’ve decided to call Lab Rat. Happy Solstice!

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The Borcher’s 4 section in the Meade Basin, Kansas. The Huckleberry Ridge Ash is visible as the white layer about a meter above the shovel. This ash is from an eruption in the Yellowstone Caldera and dated to be 2.1 million years old. 

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A lizard friend in Borcher’s Badlands. 

Between Love and Hegemony

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In which Daniel bids farewell to the United States of America, as well as his penultimate year of college.

Melancholy_of_Mechagirl

To my dear reader,

The Melancholy of Mechagirl is a collection of short stories and poems by Cathrynne M. Valente, all written during or inspired by her time spent as a Navy wife in Japan. It was the last book I read while in Tacoma, Washington, and was one of the most enjoyable pieces of fiction I’ve read in several months. The intricacies of its cultural reference, alongside the wide array of emotions and topics the stories traverse, paint a colorful and fascinating picture of her conception of the nation. In the book’s afterword, however, the author discussed her trepidation in writing about a culture which was not hers, and to which she held so much respect:

“To write of a country, a culture, a world that is not your own is an act, forever and always balanced between love and hegemony. I have tried to err on the side of love.”

Upon reading this, I was suddenly and forcibly reminded of my freshman year writing seminar. It was a class focused on travel writing the act of “othering” – viewing and altering perceptions of other cultures or groups as alien – and much of the class was spent examining writings Europeans and Americans had done on other places. Over and over again in those writings, Europeans and Americans colored their perspective with their own enculturated values and ideals, condemning different societies, exoticizing foreign women and displaying contempt for other cultures.

Ms. Valente has done, I believe, a marvelous job of treating the Japanese culture with respect. Her use of Japanese folklore and religious ideologies is insightful and meaningful, while still remaining accessible to English-speaking audiences. But this book, and that line in the afterward specifically, has remained with me because in two days, I will be departing to study abroad in Italy.

How much of study abroad is comprised of othering, I wonder? Are students from America usually seen as a form of education hegemony? What will never been mine to hold, no matter how much time I spend there? I will be there to study the intersection of Italian music and literature. What will I miss when I inevitably look at this intersection through American eyes?

I once took a composition class outside of Puget Sound with a teacher that was not a lover of world music. “Many modern composers,” he said, “have taken to using ‘ethnic’ music to spice up their compositions… silly, really.” I was initially shocked and upset that he’d said this. By saying that other culture’s music were “ethnic” he was implying that the compositions of European and American composers were effectively “real” music, and that the music of all other cultures was a tool to be used, or otherwise negligible. At the same time, however, he had a point: many composers today do use other culture’s music as a spice for their own compositions.

I suppose that the difference between doing this with love and doing this with hegemony is a question of attitude. Writing music inspired by or based on another culture’s music – much like writing inspired by or based on another culture’s writing – can be done with respect and admiration for that culture, or it can be done with disdain and disregard for that other culture. I suppose that the difference is that love is creating something on that other culture on its terms, and hegemony is creating something on your culture’s terms. As I study music and literature in Italy this summer, I shall try, as Ms. Valente, to err on the side of the former.

With all due respect,

Daniel Wolfert

Faceless

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In which Daniel ponders the grievous misrepresentation of minorities in musical theater.

To my dear reader,

At the end of this previous semester, the Unviersity of Puget Sound’s theater department put on a a condensed version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, wherein the character of Hamlet was played by (and referred to by other characters as) a woman. This, effectively, made her relationship with the character of Ofelia a lesbian romance, an aspect that was never explicitly made note of by the other characters. I was greatly impressed by the work, and pleased that a queer relationship had been made visible to the audience without fuss, but what has stuck with me from that production was one of the hand-written signs that decorated the entrance to the theater. The play’s script had been edited down to highlight certain themes, among them rebellion and social injustice, and so one hand-written sign beside the door said something along the lines of the following message:

If you want to change the world, stop asking for permission.

These may not be the exact words. There is another, similar, anonymous quote that goes “If you want to achieve greatness, stop asking for permission,” and it is possible that is what it said. But regardless, what I thought it said got me thinking about the odd relationship between minorities – and more specifically, the queer community – and theater.

There have been many works of literature discussing the subject. These books have generally suggested the same thing: when Broadway was first rising in prominence as a source of American entertainment, it was an enormous draw to minorities (queers, immigrants, Jews, etc.) because such people could not find “respectable employment” and Broadway was not considered a respectable place. What many of these books also suggest, however, is that, despite the huge proportion of queer people that Broadway has employed, queers (and most other minorities) were almost never represented on Broadway because musical theater was a machine that perpetuated white and heteronormative culture.

In some small ways, this is untrue. Although white heterosexual love stories were and are the norm of musical theater, it provided an opportunity for queer men and women to earn an income from their “unrespectable” talents (i.e. singing, dancing, songwriting, etc). In particular, Broadway brought the icon image of the proud diva to the forefront of American imagination, allowing for female leads with strong vocals and even stronger personalities to dominate the stage in a way that women have rarely been allowed to dominate in other areas of life. Queer singer and actress Ethel Merman belted out “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” in Gypsy, and there was no denying her presence.

Ethel Merman

In many other ways, however, this is very true. Looking at lists of the most famous and successful musicals of all time – Phantom of the Opera, Bye Bye Birdie, My Fair Lady, etc. – almost all of them concern a white man and a white women falling in or out of love. In the unlikely event that a minority is represented, it is usually done inaccurately and insensitively, such as when white actress Natalie Wood portrayed Puero Rican Maria in the film adaptation West Side Story.

Natalie_Wood

That alone is ridiculous. Admittedly, such a famous actress may have been necessary to the success of the film, but the entire point of the story is that the male lead is white and the female lead IS NOT. Natalie Wood did not even sing Maria’s songs in the film; another actress was hired to dub it in for her. By casting a famous white actress over a less famous Latina actress (who might have even been able to sing in a musical), musical theater again perpetuated the underlying sentiment that people that are not white and not heterosexual are a tool for those that are. In this case, this story of racial prejudice became, to a degree, merely a tool for pretty white people to sing some nice songs.

Even in rare cases when minorities are portrayed, they are usually done so insensitively and inaccurately. Such an example is that of the 1990s musical Kiss of the Spider Women, which tells the tale of two prisoners in a Latin American jail – one man an effeminate gay man that uses his imagination to escape the brutal reality, and the other a serious, heterosexual revolutionary. The fact that a Broadway musical of the time would explicitly involve gay main character is surprising, yet the trajectory of the story – in which the gay character is manipulated into betraying the revolutionary’s secrets, falls in love with the revolutionary, and dies after being used by both the revolutionary and the police.

Kiss_of_the_Spider_Woman

Throughout this story, the gay man is a victim and a puppet. He dies at the end because he is gay, and therefore at such odds with his surroundings that he must either assimilate or be eliminated. Admittedly, credit must be given where credit is due: a musical whose protagonist is queer is a remarkable and wonderful thing. But the problem remains that the queer community is still being understood on other people’s terms.

Straight people still primarily think of a white gay man when considering the queer community. Queerness is still considered, by much of the world, to be considered a “white man’s disease,” making queerness in other ethnicities a foreign concept. We are still thought of as being divided into cis-gender men and cis-gender women, despite our ranks of non-gender-binary community members. We are still tools to be used, laughed at, and played with, but so rarely recognized as people.

Great strides have been made in recent history to improve the visibility and image of the queer community, and minorities as a whole, in entertainment and media. But we are still being understood as others by mainstream America, and are being understood on their terms. I am asking for this to change. I am not asking for permission.

With all due respect,

Daniel Wolfert

I’ll Follow Thee

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In which Daniel and his sister, Hannah, explore the wild and wondrous world of the video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.Skyrim

To my dear reader,

Video games have never been of great interest to me. When I was much younger, the concept of a simulated world that I could see on a screen but not physically interact with seemed like a waste of time. This is a little counterintuitive, as I was such an avid reader of fiction, but the difference to me was that video games were not known then for being feats of narrative genius. I was also put off by the excessive violence I saw in many video games, which I saw as unpleasant and upsetting.

I feel no shame in saying that the only exceptions I held to this were the computer adaptations of the Harry Potter series and the film Lemony Snicket’s a Series of Unfortunate Events. Keep in mind that even I, with my limited video game experience, knew these were not particularly well-crafted games. But I enjoyed them by association with Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket, two of my childhood (and quasi-adulthood) fascinations. What really changed my mind was the video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skrim.

According to the debatable information found on the interwebs, this is one of a series of open world fantasy games revolving around a collection of magical worlds, including the country of Skyrim. The premise of Skyrim is built on the unexpected arrival of Alduin the World-Eater, a monstrous dragon prophesized to consume and destroy the world. The main character – which the player can design, selecting from different races (i.e. human, elf, troll, etc.), appearances and abilities – is revealed early in the game to be the Dragonborn, a non-dragon mortal born with a dragon’s soul and abilities. The game is spent travelling Skryim, bettering the player’s abilities and going on quests, all the while learning of how to defeat Alduin.

alduin

I first came across this game this previous winter break, which my sister Hannah has installed and convinced me to try. I was skeptical in the beginning, dismissing the game as silly, but it was not long before Hannah and I were up slaying dragons and collecting ancient talismans until the wee hours of the morning. Begrudgingly, I was enamored.

There are many reasons that I became so enthralled – reasons which I assume I share with my video-game playing peers. Video games provide a world in which impossible things may occur. They allow for easily tangible, single-minded goals that the player is notified when completed. They award the player for achieving small tasks, and mistakes can be done over an infinite number of times until they are rectified.

What I like best, however, are the Followers.

Followers are characters that can be found around the Skyrim who, if you save them or perform a favor for them or sometimes just ask very nicely, will be your companion. They will follow you, carry things for you, defend you and remain by your side until they die or you let them go.

Imagine if life were like that! You could just be sitting in Starbucks, drinking your mocha when someone taps you on your shoulder. “Excuse me,” they say, “but my father has been murdered by an ancient and unfathomable cosmic power and I am on a mission of vengeance. Would you like to follow me on my epic quest?”

The blind faith alone in such an action is staggering! Of course in today’s world, such an action would be foolish, impractical and extremely dangerous. People also don’t go on many missions of vengeance, I suppose. But consider the possibilities! What fun life would be if we could simply pick up chivalrous quests at the grocery store, if we could begin epic journeys at the supermarket!

What I mean to say is that the world seems such a cautious and guarded place, and something about the way that the Followers in Skyrim willingly dedicate their lives and hands to the player’s journey seems so full of possibilities – exactly the reason I like the game so much. The world of Skyrim is complex and intricate, and Followers are just one example of such a world of possibility. As I’ve said, such a world might be impractical, even dangerous. But I’d like to think that one day, I might be sitting in Starbucks, drinking my mocha, when someone will tap me on the shoulder and request my help on an epic quest. And when that day comes, I shall take after those Followers, put down my mocha, and begin something remarkable.

With all due respect,

Daniel Wolfert

Teach by Deed

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In which Daniel considers the mentors of basketball coach John Wooden, as well as his own.

Wooden_Game_Plan

To my dear reader,

I have always had an aversion to sports. There are many reasons for this, among them my small physical stature, my lack of bodily coordination, my distrust of the concept of “teamwork,” and the negative dissonance between social constructions of athleticism and homosexuality. But despite all of these reasons, a figure that has begun to loom large over my life is that of John Wooden, now late basketball coach, literature teacher, and author.

Alongside his remarkable achievements in the field of athletics, including leading the UCLA Bruins to ten championships in his time as coach, Wooden has become incredibly well known as a fountain of wisdom on the subjects of teamwork, discipline and life over all. It is only after reading his book A Game Plan for Life: The Power of Mentoring have I truly realized how much he has been an “invisible mentor” – a teacher that I have never met but has continually guided me through his writings and teachings – and all in spite of my initial trepidation.

This got me thinking about the role of mentors within my life, and who they have been thus far. In his writing, Wooden made a point of saying that mentors need not be people that one has necessarily met, but I believe that this principle extends farther: mentors need not even be real people. I have certainly felt more mentored by many fictional people than by the real people in my life, and the effects of this are no less valid or real. Thus came to be the following list of the seven most prominent mentors of my life:

1. Katy Perry

Katy_Perry_Teenage_Dream

“If stars don’t align, if it doesn’t stop time, if you can’t see the sign, wait for it.”

I first truly came in contact with Katy Perry’s music during the end of my senior year of high school. I had decided, on a whim, to put her Teenage Dream album on my iPod, and sharing this album with Spencer Orbegozo – a classmate that was destined to become my best friend – was, unwittingly, one of the best decisions of my life. This album became the cornerstone of our friendship, and came to me at a time when I needed something that would propel my into the future. The simple, optimistic beauty of the line “Let’s run away, and don’t ever look back” encapsulates all the joyful momentum that I do not possess, but wish to have. Alongside opening me up to the world of trashy pop (an inexhaustible source of joy for me), Katy Perry taught me to look to the future with hope.

2.Tina Fey

Bosspants

“To say I’m an overrated troll, when you have never even seen me guard a bridge, is patently unfair.”

If there is one mentor on this list that I am most similar to, it is undoubtedly Tina Fey. In her genius autobiography Bossypants, Miss Fey cites strong parental influence, bad skin, and love of musical theater as the driving forces of her life – if that doesn’t describe my life, what does? But more than simply providing me with a famous face to identify with, Tina Fey (and Bossypants itself) demonstrated the ability to laugh at one’s failures and find humor in the endless drudgery of life. Tina Fey taught me to accept my own disastrous self.

3. Uncle Iroh

Uncle_Iroh

“Destiny is a funny thing. You never know how things are going to work out. But if you keep an open mind and an open heart, I promise you will find your own destiny someday.”

Being the most fictional of my mentors, it is somewhat more difficult to explain how this character from the TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender has affected me. Avatar was only one of many fascinations I held as a child, the others including the works of Lemony Snicket and the Harry Potter series, yet no character in those other stories held as much sway over me as Iroh. Across the TV series, Iroh acts as the protective uncle and gentle guide to the series’ troubled antihero (his nephew), providing comic relief and wise perspective in equal measure. But it was the humanity of Iroh that really struck me. Iroh became angry at his nephew when his nephew was too prideful, became weary from his turbulent life, and became hungry more or less constantly. Iroh taught me not only to love tea, but also life, with good humor and perspective.

4. Tarn Wilson

“Write the book you would want to read.”

When I first joined her creative writing class in my junior year of high school, Tarn Wilson was merely another very nice and intelligent teacher employed by Gunn High School. After I turned in an autobiographical work describing some serious emotional troubles, however, Ms. Wilson called me into her office and had me speak with her to ensure I was emotionally healthy. Tarn Wilson taught me many suprising and insightful things about writing itself, but taught me even more about the act of creation – creating a story and creating a life. Life will not appear, she explained, until you do – not your parents or teachers or friends or even mentors, but you. Tarn Wilson taught me that my life is a story, and I must learn to be its author.

5. Cathrynne M. Valente

Valente

“As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Doctor Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits.”

I recently wrote a blog post detailing my feelings toward science fiction and fantasy author Cathrynne M. Valente, which can be found here (http://blogs.pugetsound.edu/whatwedo/2015/04/01/an-open-letter-to-catherynne-m-valente/), but to get to the heart of what I mean to say, it is crucial to understand my first experience with her writing. I first discovered her book The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making the summer after my freshman year of college, and just like Teenage Dream, this book came to me at a time when I very much needed magic in my life. Over and over again in her literary works, Miss Valente has demonstrated a delicate mastery of intelligence, whimsy, humor and sensitivity that I can only dream of one day achieving. Cathrynne M. Valente taught me to find magic in all facets of life.

6. John Wooden

John_Wooden

“Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”

By far the most pragmatic of my mentors, basketball coach John Wooden was introduced to me through my fraternity’s leadership program, the Wooden Institute. What struck me most about Wooden when I learned of him was his dedication to organization. Something that Wooden is famous for is his process of teaching new players the proper way to put on socks. He would ensure that the socks fit on snugly and without wrinkles, and that the laces were pulled and tied firmly, so as to avoid loose shoes, and therefore, blisters. This would ensure greater comfort during practice, leading to more better practice technique and ultimately better training. Many, if not all, of Wooden’s accomplishments demonstrate his commitment to quality, but this simple and tangible action demonstrated this to me the most. John Wooden taught me dedication to performing effective work.

7. Spencer Orbegozo

“There truly is no me without you.”

Of all my mentors, the one with the most powerful, immediate, lasting and obvious impact on me is my best friend. After spending a year in freshman Physical Education together during high school, we overcame our initial dislike for one another. This tentative peace became a tentative friendship, which eventually became the bond that remains to this day. Spencer and I call one another every other weekend, and periodically write letters of extreme length and detail to one another. He has taught me more things than I can count, and more than I’m sure I could actually recall, but more than anything, Spencer has taught me to believe in the worth of oneself no matter how others think. Spencer taught me, in the words of Gladys Knight and the Pips (a band he is fond of), to “keep on keepin’ on.”

And that’s just what I’ll do.

With all due respect,

Daniel Wolfert

Words Just Seem to Complicate It

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In which Daniel says something nice about Greek Life (and Ariana Grande).

Cover_art_for_single_Baby,_I

NOTE: No opinion expressed here is meant to represent the University of Puget Sound, any of its faculty, students or staff, any of its internal organizations, Beta Theta Pi, any Greek house, or Greek Life as a whole. They are solely meant to express personal views that I hold which may change in the future.

To my dear reader,

Earlier this year, the student newspaper, The Trail, published an article about Greek Life at the University of Puget Sound (which can be read here: http://trail.pugetsound.edu/?p=12732). While the article was meant to be an impartial assessment of the state of fraternities and sororities at the school, I found the article to be somewhat pointed, implying that certain houses within our Greek system – if not the entire system – are flawed. The article left me with the impression that its writers were looking at Greek Life from a critical standpoint, but not necessarily with the intention of balancing out the examination of Greek Life’s cons with its pros.

I believe this to be understandable. Questioning our systems of social structure and power are crucial to improving them. But reading the article as a member of Greek Life (the fraternity Beta Theta Pi) made me realize that I have spent more time and energy examining Greek Life’s faults and discussing them with the wider community than appreciating its virtues and explaining them to the wider community. Of course there are many deep and enduring problems to correct, but time must be taken to say what is good alongside what it not. And because of the way the chips have fallen, and because the universe is sly and underhanded, there is no better way to do this than through Ariana Grande.

Allow me to explain myself:

During my first three semesters as a Beta – my entire sophomore year and the first semester as a junior – I was extremely skeptical. The concept of fraternities was one that left a sour taste in my mouth, and in some ways, still does. History classes have left me with the impression that groups of primarily white, primarily middle-to-upper-class, primarily heterosexual and almost certainly cis-gender men don’t tend to be terribly nice. Being the ones that most benefit from Western social structures, they can believe their value and worth to be intrinsic, and become very defensive if they feel that is being questioned. I don’t mean to attack people matching such a description; this is merely what history has suggested to me.

Beyond this idealistic skepticism, however, I held the more personal skepticism of the very concept of “community.” Why was I to give trust and respect to a group of people I barely knew out of principle? Weren’t they meant to be earned? I would never expect someone to trust or respect me until they got to know me better – and even then, maybe not.

It’s not that the members of Beta themselves did anything wrong in all that time. They were perfectly nice, well-meaning, intelligent men that wanted the best for the colony. But I’ve always been poor with interpersonal relationships, and I was growing weary of devoting so much time and energy to something in which I had so little investment.  By the end of December of 2014, I had my heart set on leaving.

But the universe, being sly and underhanded, prevented me from burning the bridge then and there because I had already signed up to attend the Wooden Institute, a leadership program run by the General Fraternity. Cursing myself for paying the registration fee, I begrudgingly attended in January of 2015. The universe, being sly and underhanded, brought me to the program so that it could change my life.

Those who desire may read about it here: http://blogs.pugetsound.edu/whatwedo/2015/02/17/darling-were-a-nightmare-dressed-like-a-daydream/

Fast forward to the beginning of the spring semester and I told my brothers about Wooden. I had nothing but praise for it, but attending forced me to voice a complaint about out colony – namely, that I had grown closer to my brothers at Wooden in three days faster than my brothers at Puget Sound in three semesters. And the universe, being sly and underhanded, brought the rambunctious powerhouse of a person named Jake Ashby to me, insistent on rectifying the problem Wooden had illuminated to me. With all the subtlety of a wrecking ball, Jake Ashby barreled into my life and planted himself as a face both abrasively insistent and endlessly supportive.

But what does this have to do with Ariana Grande, you ask?

Patience, dear reader. All in good time…

A week or so into the new semester, I was hunting through some music that my sister had sent, which included several songs by that Princess of Pop Sopranos, Ms. Grande. I was not immediately thrilled by them, but was entertained enough that I considered finding more of her music. Oddly enough, I had spoken to another Beta, a fellow junior named Rae Hermosillo Torres, about Ms. Grande’s music and how much we indulgently enjoyed her, and so I stopped by his room one day and asked him if he could give me her two albums. Gracious man that he is he obliged with gusto. And the universe, being sly and underhanded, brought him too into my life as a face both unexpectedly warm and unceasingly friendly.

Ray Hermosillo Torres, right, Jake Ashby, left.

Ray Hermosillo Torres, left, Jake Ashby, right.

The remainder of the semester occurred as it did. There were trials plentiful, and enough tribulation to bury me alive. I drowned my sorrows in half-price Frappucinos during Starbucks’ Frappucino Happy Hour, and spent more nights without sleep than ever before. I fought valiantly to keep my grades high and less valiantly to take care of my health, and generally panicked about things that didn’t matter. But at the end of the day, the universe, being sly and underhanded, gave me two brilliant albums by Ariana Grande, a group of brothers at Puget Sound of which I’ve grown tremendously fond, and a blog on which I can write about it all. At the end of the day, I remember walking back to the Beta House after all my classes and rehearsals were done, exhausted and worn out, with Ariana Grande’s “Baby I” playing on my iPod, glad that I was heading home.

This is not all to criticize The Trail itself or to say that The Trail’s article is not valid. It is filled with completely accurate points about the state of Greek Life and ways in which it needs to improve and became more safe and inclusive. Sexual assault is absolutely a problem that must be solved; Greek Life must be made inclusive to minorities; the gender binary that Greek Life perpetuates must be faced. I don’t want to say whether it’s all pointless or good or bad. I don’t have enough experience, knowledge or wisdom to say if Greek Life is intrinsically problematic or not. Nor is it my place to say. But I don’t want to discuss only the faults. I don’t want to just say what’s wrong when good things are happening too.

All I’m trying to say is that maybe there might be something good about Greek Life. I’m trying to say that Beta is, in all truth, the most positive force that has yet occurred in my tiny life. But why should I say anything when Ariana Grande could do it for me?

With all due respect,

Daniel Wolfert