The Smell of Gingerbread

 It’s a little difficult for me to trace my direct journey from “person who likes doing gingerbread houses” to “person who makes faux-pretentious statements about gingerbread houses”, but I guess that’s part of my Christmas identity now, so let’s talk about it. I know that, once upon a time, it was just “how much sugar can I put on this piece of graham cracker, and is the answer all of it?” and so I would spend multiple hours crafting during one of my elementary school’s many winter fundraisers. There was one year I remember where making houses at home where I envisioned tiling the entire roof with Necco wafers, which were a pain to eat afterwards (Necco wafers are pretty low on the candy tier list).

Eventually, we as a family moved on to these instructional make-your-own kits, and what probably happened is that I couldn’t figure out how to make one properly so I just attached the house pieces willy-nilly and called it a day. The artistic statements came from a place of, I dunno, I guess I wanted to justify myself somehow, and people found it funny so it stuck.

So that continued for a few years. This year’s, like so much of this year, was different, and again we’re back to pre-built houses. I thought about just taking a hammer to the thing but had this vision of propping it upside-down using some candy. Titles are weird for things like this but as long as I’m uploading pictures, I might as well. Named after the Billy Bragg song, this is “The World Turned Upside Down”:

I dunno if I’m actually going to eat it. The gingerbread has historically tasted terrible for these sorts of things and my samples of the provided candy did not turn out much better, but it is nice having the smell of gingerbread this holiday season, even if everything else is falling apart.

-F

Old Christmas TV

 The Rankin-Bass Christmas specials are kind of bad, aren’t they? Now, I’m going to be upfront and say that that opening sentence is definitely misleading for the final product of this post, but at the same time, I do think that has to be said. They’re the adorable sort of bad, but I don’t think they’d air as frequently as they do if they were made today. I also should say I understand that one of the reasons they do still air is because they’re old. Old content draws eyeballs for a minimum amount of work (the games industry is actually undergoing this revelation as well for certain rereleases of games, but that’s another blog post).

What I want to talk about is how I think these draw eyeballs because they’re old as well. They’re similar to A Christmas Story in that way, how being played over and over for free programming at Christmas makes them more associated with holiday traditions every year. Because they’re traditions, then, they become associated with the past.

A Christmas Story is kind of about this already, being made in the eighties about some mythical American forties, though it never really interrogates its own nostalgia (there’s a whole Dan Olsen video about this so I won’t dig into it too hard). But the Rankin-Bass specials, accompanied by A Charlie Brown Christmas don’t even have that excuse. They just got bought up at the right time by the right company.

I think the biggest indicator that this is what’s going on is every time they try and introduce a new Christmas special. I remember this big marketing push for something called Arthur Christmas, and after that, it was something I can’t even remember the title for about Elf on the Shelf toys. Both of these fell flat. They haven’t melted into the popular discussion in the same way, and I think they’re doomed to stay down there, at least for a few decades.

-F

Drilled Into My Head

Every Wednesday at noon there’s a siren that goes off throughout the area, the weekly test of the weather warnings that’s not too hard to tune out once you get used to it. It only lasts about a minute anyway, so even if you don’t, it’s still not big a deal, to the point that it generally doesn’t get remarked upon at all outside of the joking question, “What happens if there is severe weather and it’s also the scheduled test time?”

And like, obviously there are serious answers to this question. “They don’t have a drill when there might be an actual threat,” is the actual answer, though my particular favorite is saying “Well, when you hear it, what’s the sky look like?” in a particularly smarmy tone. But the joke answer, “we’ll all be doomed,” still seems to permeate. And this isn’t just a local thing, either. I’ve seen the joke made in entirely different states to the one I’m in.

I wonder if the joke has turned into a memetic device of sorts, reminding people to pay attention to the siren in the first place. Sure, that instant recognition also comes with hearing it all my life, but the additional association makes it harder to ignore when things matter.

-F

Super Tuesday

It’s Super Tuesday today, which, for the non-American readers out there, is a pretty big political event here in the race for our presidency. My state doesn’t participate, but that doesn’t mean I can’t relate a pretty funny story that happened around this time.

I went to a Catholic school growing up, which meant mass on many religious holidays. Ash Wednesday was one of those days. This was both a good thing and a bad thing, good because it meant an hour away from classes, and bad because, well, when you’re in Middle School, church is kind of boring. I’m not going to pretend I was paying attention the entire time, but one moment on this particular Ash Wednesday service stands out.

During the homily, the priest began by asking everyone what the day before was called. The answer he was looking for was “Mardi Gras” or maybe “Fat Tuesday” would also have been accepted. But Mardi Gras and Super Tuesday had happened to overlap that year, so I stuck my hand up and shouted, from the back of the church, “Super Fat Tuesday!”

Only one person laughed, but it was my English teacher so that has to count for something.

-F

Your Vote Matters

Oof, this is going to come off a little cynical, isn’t it? I guess I should lead with this, then: Yes, I voted today. Despite all this essay might say, I still vote regularly. But…

In an online town hall, Bernie Sanders described this midterm as “the most important Midterm of our generation,” kind of like how two years ago was “the most important election of our generation” and while I don’t really remember the rhetoric of four years ago the midterms were probably important then too (not important enough, of course, to get the average American to vote but ehhh…).

Another common piece of rhetoric is “Your vote matters. Your vote always matters.” And yes, there are a myriad of examples where this is true. Anecdotes abound of ties and near-ties and coin flips and recounts, but where I think these go wrong is not providing examples of the other side of the coin: The times when it’s almost unanimous but not quite. Sure, these examples negate the general argument the “Voting Matters” people are trying to make (you can make a difference), but perhaps consider this alternative argument: “You should let your voice be heard.” This, I think, can be demonstrated very well with these sorts of overwhelming defeats.

So here’s my story. It’s nothing so dramatic as a federal or even state election; it was a high school student-level forum. Now, my high-school was a little different in that they tried to let their students have much more of a say in the goings-on of the school. Every one of these meetings, somebody tried to move the school’s dress code away from business casual, for example.

The big-name item on this particular meeting was the school’s schedule. The high school was in many ways an extension of the big-name college in the city. Seniors and even many Juniors took a lot of college-level classes and the high-school had a lot of oddities to accommodate that. The one most specific for this essay was the trimester-style scheduling, which itself mirrored the college experience at the time.

But times change. The college was moving to semesters, with an auxiliary “May-term” to accommodate missing any credit hours that might be lost in the schedule change. The proposal for the high school was a similar semester schedule, but with a “January term” or “J-term” for… reasons I don’t really remember anymore.

I remember Freshman-age me not being a particular fan of this change. The tentative schedule proposed still didn’t sync up all that well with the colleges, and J-term seemed needlessly complex. I also wasn’t really convinced by the arguments to change. The most egregious argument came from one then-Junior who really wanted to go sailing over summer break and this schedule would… cut into that I guess? By a week or two? The point was, I felt it was in my best interest if the school kept going with its trimester-styled schedule.

Voting was something of an embarrassing experience. Instead of counting “ayes” or ballots, they had all in favor of a particular motion stand up and those running the meeting would gauge the results from there. Voting in favor of trimesters went first, so up I went.

Nobody else stood up with me.

Some people laughed. I heard somebody yell “Sit down!”

The next morning, the results of the forum were announced. The semester schedule won in a unanimous fashion. Now, a quick google search of the word “unanimous” will yield this:

u·nan·i·mous
/yo͞oˈnanəməs/
[...]
2. (of an opinion, decision, or vote) held or carried by everyone involved.

Uh huh.

I tried not to cause too much of a disruption, but I do remember saying, “It wasn’t unanimous.”

The response was, “It was basically unanimous.”

These sorts of fora at my high school died out within a few years and I think this was one of the reasons why. Even at the level people reference when attempting to convince people to go to the polls, the most micro of levels, votes can get discounted.

Again, this is going to come off as cynical. One could easily read this as a cautionary tale against democracy. But to me, I think about this as trying my damnedest to get an opinion across. Sure I failed (and, as a schadenfreude-y aside, J-term did turn out to be a needlessly complex addition to an already weird high school), but I did try. And when I filled out my ballot today, that’s what I thought about.

-F

Write What You Know

I had this story idea. The main character (told in first-person, of course) was going to be wandering their old elementary school when they remember that, as a kid, they never went into their school’s basement. Nobody did. Because, you know, of what kind of story it would have been, when our main character inevitably explores that lower level, they come across all kind of demonic imagery. There would have been blood, either molded or crusty with age (I didn’t do any research and wasn’t sure) all over the walls, sometimes forming a pentagram, sometimes, just there because, well, that’s what you write about when describing a room like this.

There was going to be something else in the room, too. Something alive. Something contained in that basement that, now that the door had been opened could escape and enact whatever sinister plan it had.

I never got that far. I never even knew what the creature was going to be. I just knew how I would have felt descending into that basement, and I knew what had to be at the bottom. You see, I never had to deal with demons or other such monsters in elementary school, but I did have to deal with my third-grade English teacher.

Nancy was, from what I remember of her, an okay English teacher. Like, she certainly didn’t go above and beyond fostering her students’ latent interests in writing, but she, you know, did teach us the ins and outs of sentence structure and hey, I guess that’s all you can ask for in third grade. And by the way, Nancy’s not actually her name. But if I’m going to speak ill of the dead, I’d rather not use more identifiers than I have to. You see, Nancy had an, ah, other side to her. And when trying to remember events from my elementary-school life, she tends to dominate my thoughts.

Sometimes, for example, Nancy told these old wives tales. Which, you know, is fine. But to impressionable eight or nine-year-old minds, well, when you tell them that cracking your knuckles leads to brittle bones and your mother cracks her knuckles all the time, well, it just might drive a kid to tears.

But there were also these other, more sinister moments. We were talking about street names once, and Nancy polled the class asking what type of street each person lived on. “A street? A road? An avenue? A boulevard?” I never raised my hand to any of those. I lived on a “Way.”

Nancy never asked what I lived on, though. At the end of those four questions, instead she said, “Well, I don’t know what else you could live on unless you lived in a bag.” And I didn’t know how to respond to that. Because I knew I lived on a way. But I didn’t have the words to express that at all.

In my story, the demon was going to torment the protagonist in largely the same way. The demon was going to present these illusory worlds, at once both grotesque as they were beautiful, and it was going to be these visions that would prompt the protagonist to investigate in the first place. Because the world couldn’t be wrong by itself, right? Somebody had to be at fault, right?

There’s this recurring dream I remember having during my time as a third grader. I don’t remember too many details now, obviously, but I do remember lying on my back, arms outstretched like some sort of horizontal crucifix, being bathed in a dim red light. And then, well…

So the basement at my school was full of rumors. Nobody ever seemed to go down there, and the few times that somebody did open the door, there was this weird red tint over everything, like somebody had put red tissue paper over the single lightbulb down there. And the smell! The rumor going around was that teachers like Nancy snuck down there to smoke cigarettes.

It always smelled like brimstone to me, though.

• • •

There’s one specific moment that sticks out when I think about Nancy. I remember staying a little after class as a sort of detention for not turning in homework on time. Now during this detention I remember Nancy not really referring to me by name at all, just saying things like “Sit here and do your homework.” Which, you know, is fine. She was mad at me. Whatever. But as I was packing up and getting ready to go home, she said, “See you tomorrow, Finlay.”

My name’s not Finlay. But when I said that, she said, “Well, you don’t deserve your name.”

In my dream, I remember a claw reaching out and making a cut right around my left temple, tracing my face in a single blood-red line down to my chin, then back up and around, following my hairline just so before returning to its original starting point. I remember how loose and ill-fitting my face felt in that moment, and how I tried to scream as the claw started peeling it off. But I couldn’t. That’s the thing about dreams, if you’re not lucid, you’re completely helpless against them.

I wanted to translate that feeling to the protagonist of my story, too. I mean, if I was basing it off myself it should have been easy, right? I could have this character who would lose his sense of place and identity to this… this thing, and I mean, I still remember those feelings well enough, right?

• • •

There’s one final story I remember about Nancy. You see, near the end of the school year, she would lead all the third graders on an overnight field trip up to the lake. This was “the big thing” back in third grade. Kids spent a month preparing for it and even longer talking about it. It even infected schoolwork, with science classes spending time talking about fish biology and all the math word problems having a “lakeside” theme to them.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a great time! I mean, when you’re nine, every time is a great time, but this was one of the first times I had ever been up to the lake, and with so many different things scheduled, it was hard to not enjoy it. But at the same time, there’s this one moment.

It was late. I mean, I don’t remember exactly what time, but I had just woken up to use the restroom, and Nancy was standing there right over me. There was a dead look in her eyes, like this time, of all the times, she had slipped a little bit further into the abyss.

“Nancy?” I said.

And she just kept looking at me for a long while, as if she was still deciding what to do with me. For the longest time, neither of us moved. We just stared at each other, me. helpless, barely under the covers and her, well, I don’t even have the words anymore to describe her. But then she spoke:

“The angels are gone,” she said.

It was barely a whisper, but it was deafening in the silence.

The next thing I heard was Nancy slowly turning and shuffling back out of the room. In the morning, she was fine! I mean, she didn’t mention anything about the previous night (and I didn’t dare bring it up) but she was, you know, normal! She was back to telling us how dangerous leeches were and how her sister once nearly got eaten alive by the things, back to getting overly fussy around docks and all those other things old teachers do.

• • •

Nancy retired a couple years after I graduated elementary, but when I was in college, I would come back and volunteer with the after-school program. It was easy enough, take attendance and then play with the kids until their parents and/or guardians picked them up. After that, I just had to clean up a little and I could go home.

I never had to go in the basement, but it always tempted me. I could always see that familiar red tint under the door. But I always told myself it was none of my business. And it never was.

One day, though, well, I figured just a peek wouldn’t hurt, right? I mean, Nancy had tormented me, not just in these moments during the school day, but in my dreams as well, right? I had to know what was going on down there because there had to be something. She was down there all the time! What was she doing? Acting solely on this whim, I marched straight to the basement door, threw it open, and went down those final stairs.

But there was nothing. It was just a smokey old storage basement. And when the door creaked closed behind me, I was left alone, just me and my thoughts.

-F

Anime Music

Here are a few things I don’t really keep private, even if I haven’t mentioned them yet on this blog: I played soccer in high school, and occasionally I listen to music my parents not-so-affectionately refer to as “Techno-Bluegrass.”

That’s fine, though. That’s the stereotype. Parents aren’t supposed to like their children’s music. And Eurobeat -- the actual name for Techno-Bluegrass -- certainly leans more towards the “acquired taste” side of things. It’s certainly aggressive at times, and, to my mother’s chagrin, occasionally uses the banjo as part of its melody. But through various media, from cartoons to Sonic the Hedgehog, Eurobeat has become its own little niche of “pump-up” music best used for anything from workouts to simply staying awake in the car.

This is why, whenever I got the opportunity to run the booth during Junior Varsity’s pregame warmups, I went straight to it. I didn’t get to too many times, mind you, but I did take the opportunities I got.

This story takes place in senior year of high school. Our previous soccer coach had decided to retire after just having won us our league’s championship, leaving us with high spirits, but maybe more than a little tentative energy meeting our new coach. At one point early in the season, after a particularly disjointed practice, this new coach declared that we needed to write a one-page paper on teamwork. I half-assed it like any senior would.

I apparently made him cry.

We were coming in on the final games of the season, and this was perhaps my third or fourth time in the booth. Dave Simon’s Speed Man had just wrapped up, and I was going to pick another song when the head coach entered the booth.

“Let me play a song,” he said.

He played Jason Aldean’s The Only Way I Know. Which I would be fine with. I’m not the biggest fan of where country music has gone in the past few years (even if typing that sentence makes me the biggest snob on the planet), but its lyrics were relevant to the situation. It’s a song about winning. So yes, I would have been fine with it.

If he hadn’t also said, “Enough of this anime crap.”

I get it. I get how each generation hates every other generation’s music. I’ve had discussions on the merits of a brostep creator versus a symphony. I’ve internally tried to keep track of what my friends are listening to so I can avoid playing anything we disagree on aloud. But I’m not sure what’s accomplished by, when leading a team already falling apart at the seams, already ready to get the season over with, that specific comment needed to be made.

-F