I think if I encounter one more video or Tweet of someone explaining a complicated “theory” involving either the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Star Wars, I’m going to curb-stomp my phone. Visual media in general is dead to me outside of video games; if it’s not a cooking show I can’t motivate myself to watch it any longer, and The Book of Boba Fett is terrible. I thought for an hour or so that we might be watching Eternals tonight now that it’s streaming and I can watch it without paying extra for it, but my wife has decided she’s healthy enough to make an appearance at work tomorrow (I have the day off, of course) so she doesn’t want to stay up for it.
I need a new fandom I can dig my teeth into, something that isn’t personally exhausting and whose fans aren’t spectacularly toxic.
What’s good out there? What should I be paying attention to?
I first encountered this book through Twitter, and I’ve completely lost track of how; I’m not even sure if it was specifically recommended to me or whether I just happened across someone being enthusiastic about it. At any rate, I’m mad at everyone else who has read it. Why? Because all of you should have recommended this book to me– yes, to me specifically, whether you know who the hell I am or not– because I’m pretty sure this book was written for me and me alone.
This is another “tell you the premise, and then I’m done” sort of book. The Affair of the Mysterious Letter is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, starring a bisexual, amoral sorceress named Shaharazad Haas in the Holmes role and a transexual gay man(*) named John Wyndham in the role of Watson. The book starts off as a clear homage to A Study in Scarlet, as Wyndham arrives in the city of Khelathra-Ven as a wounded veteran of a war in another dimension, in need of a job and housing, and ends up answering an ad for a place at 221B Martyrs Lane, where he meets Haas.
Who immediately attempts to shoot him.
You may have noticed the word sorceress. Wyndham is very Victorian British in his comportment and his morals, and Alexis Hall’s ability to mimic the writing style of the Holmes stories is flat-out uncanny, but the rest of the book is pure eldritch horror, where I want to compare it to Lovecraft but the simple fact is that I think Alexis Hall out-Lovecrafts Lovecraft. He does forbidden knowledge Man is not meant to taste very, very well, and Haas might be the single most memorable practitioner of magic I’ve ever encountered. They end up in Carcosa for a while. There are byakhees. And vampires. And Wyndham fights a shark. Their landlady is an intelligent swarm of bees inhabiting a corpse. Well, two, actually, as one rots away enough to become useless over the course of the book and she needs to acquire another.
It’s absolutely delicious.
So, yeah, while it goes without saying that this book gets one of my highest recommendations; I will admit I have some slight criticisms of the overall structure of the story. Affair starts off with five suspects for a blackmail and then has basically five sub-quests where people are progressively ruled out; it sounds weird to both say that I loved a book and that it could have been a bit shorter, but any time you build in that structure where there are Five Things to Be Accomplished, you end up with a book that sort of has the feel of a video game and by the end of it the reader kind of wants to get to the point. I combatted this by reading the book somewhat more slowly than I might have expected from something I was enjoying as much as I was; I actually dragged this one out a bit rather than devouring it at a sitting, which is my normal move.
But … God, you need to read this. I think right now it’s planned as a one-shot, which is a damned shame if it’s true, because (much like Watson) Wyndham is writing this story from the perspective of twenty years in the future, when Haas is actually dead, and there are tons of references to other mysteries and other adventures. I want to read these stories; I have got to have more of Shaharazad Haas in my life, because she is utterly fascinating as a character. Another thing I haven’t mentioned is the humor; there’s more than a little of Douglas Adams’ DNA in this book. In fact, I took this picture and sent it to a friend of mine who I was pitching the book for, and I might as well include it here as a quote:
Wyndham’s unwillingness to swear or repeat profanity in the text of the story, and his squeamishness around women, and his frequent asides to his editor are all fantastically dry humor, and I laughed out loud several times while reading the book, once loud enough that my son emerged from another room to ask me what was so funny. The boy notices nothing, so this is quite an achievement.
Anyway, yeah, you want this one. Go pick it up.
(*) I actually need to have a conversation with someone about the trans angle, because, I admit, I completely missed it on my first read, and upon seeing some references to it on Goodreads went back and reread the first chapter, where a single sentence refers to Wyndham “becoming himself for the first time,” or something very similar. I don’t think I missed a ton of references, and that sentence strikes me as something that’s going to have immediate salience for a trans reader that it might not for a cisgendered one. Then again, I read Gideon the Ninth twice and Harrowhark the Ninth once before realizing that Harrowhark was Harrowhark and not Harrowhawk, so occasionally I am absolutely a blinkered idiot.
I discovered today that I have a new student coming into my class on Tuesday. And by “my class” I mean “third and fourth hour,” the class I have repeatedly begged that no further students be added to, the class that is both my biggest and my by an exceptional margin most poorly-behaved class.
The student is an Afghan refugee. I have no idea if she speaks any English; I sure as fuck don’t speak either Pashto or Dari. I have no idea what her educational background is. Hell, I have no idea what her personal background is; if she’s coming out of Afghanistan there’s almost certainly some fucking trauma in there somewhere. She has a brother, and her brother’s teacher told me today that he thinks that her father worked with the Americans in some capacity or another, which could mean fucking anything. It might mean she speaks some English, it might not. For all I know, he’s making assumptions– which, okay, as they go, that’s not a bad one, but it’s still an assumption. And if I hadn’t seen her name and started asking questions today this would have happened with no Goddamned warning of any kind at all.
To be absolutely clear: I’m glad she’s here, if that’s what her family wanted, and yes I’d be perfectly fucking happy to have an Afghan family move into the house next door and replace the family of the dude who took one look at my white skin and told me he was happy “the right kind of people” were moving into our house when we bought it. I’m glad she’s in my school. But this is not a regular fucking transfer student! I’m just as responsible for her education as every other kid in the room; I don’t get to just shove her in a corner and ignore her, and if it turns out that she’s a hijabi I’ve got to prepare the students for her to be there as well. Now, granted, one can probably assume that any Afghans looking to flee the country and enroll their kids in public school in bloody Indiana are probably on the less religiously conservative end of the scale, but even a simple head wrap combined with the language barrier is going to set her up for bullying if we aren’t careful, especially in the class they’ve got her in. If she’s wearing anything more conspicuous than that the kids are going to treat her like a Goddamned alien. Can we at least get a parent meeting before this kid comes into school? Shit, Google Translate isn’t even going to help, because you can’t type in Pashto on a Chromebook. I can get it to translate– probably poorly– from English to Pashto (not that I have any way to figure out if she speaks it, since fucked if I know the difference between it and Dari, or Arabic for that matter) but not the other way around. So if she’s got no English at all we’re limited to gestures and sign language.
It’s entirely possible that she’ll turn out to be Westernized enough already that none of this will be an issue; again, I know nothing about her. But if she isn’t?
Fuck.
1/16 EDIT: It has only just now occurred to me that even if this girl is literate in her home language, which is not guaranteed, her home language is not going to be written in Latin script, and therefore she may not even know the alphabet. And I’m supposed to teach her 8th grade math.
On the one hand, my dinner just now represents somewhat of a milestone. I wasn’t in the mood for anything we had premade and on hand, and I didn’t want to leave the house to go get something, so I looked in the pantry, found some ingredients, and put together a tasty thing to eat. On the other, what basically amounted to ramen tomato soup doesn’t really scream “creativity,” and it doesn’t look like much either, but here it is:
That’s butter, minced garlic, tomato paste, cream of chicken soup, a little bit of heavy cream, ramen, freshly-grated parmesan, and salt and pepper, and if I’d have been thinking I’d have thrown some Italian seasoning into the sauce as well. Yeah, it looks a little gross; I am not a food photographer, shut up. Yes, I could have achieved very similar results by simply throwing a block of ramen into a half-jar of Ragú, and if I’d done it that way I would have the balance of sauce to ramen much better than this, which had too much sauce. Oh, and next time I definitely need to cook the ramen separately, as the sauce didn’t have enough water in it to cook it with its normal speed. (It wasn’t undercooked, and I added water, but next time I need to just cook it separately.
I’m not going to start writing cookbooks or anything, but this still feels like a step of some sort, as I am very very reliant on and panicky about recipes whenever I actually cook anything. So … yay me? Sure. Yay me.
Fascinatingly, I am not sick. But my wife is! My wife, who never ever gets sick, who comes from a family where living to 120 is considered underachieving, tested Covid-positive last night. And I, who sleep in the same bed as this woman, remain, as of this morning, almost annoyingly negative. I don’t know how to explain this feeling I have right now. I don’t want to be sick, and I don’t want to have Covid. But my wife has it, and based on all the knowledge I currently have about this disease and its level of transmissibility, spending several days unmasked in the same room with someone who is infectious should practically guarantee that I catch it. And yet I have not caught it, nor has my son, so the possibility of doing so in the near future gets to continue to dangle frustratingly over my head.
I did not go to work today, as I had a slight sore throat (which I have had for several days) and I already had a doctor’s appointment scheduled this morning. I woke up, took a second test– negative again– then went to my doctor’s office, where they redirected me to the back of the building and into a “respiration room,” which was more or less the same as a normal room except with an enormous air filter in it running at high speed. They gave me a third test, which was negative again, then confirmed my plan to stay home as a good one. I went through my checkup, had a blood draw and a pneumonia shot (I replied “I will take all the shots” when asked if I wanted the vaccine) and went home. I spoke with someone from HR who also confirmed that staying home had been the right move because of the sore throat and told me that my Official Instructions from Downtown were to take a fourth test tomorrow morning. If I remain negative, I go to work; if I’m positive, I stay home. Friday is an inservice day, so no kids, and Monday is MLK day, so this would actually be a pretty good weekend to be sick in terms of not missing a lot of school.
Also, if I’m positive, I have to take a selfie of myself with the positive test and send that to the HR lady I talked to, which I find kind of hilarious.
Also possible: that sore throat has been with me for a minute now. It’s not exactly an unexpected thing for a teacher in January to have a sore throat for pretty obvious reasons, but it might be that I actually had covid last week and was so asymptomatic that I didn’t realize it, or at least my symptoms fell so in line with what I was expecting anyway that it never occurred to me to take a test. It’s not entirely unreasonable to theorize that I might have infected her. Another fun possibility that I didn’t think about until after the pneumonia shot was that that could also have side effects, and I do tend to get a day of gross out of vaccines, so it’ll be fun to try and sort those out from potential covid symptoms.
I have been instructed to monitor myself for headaches and diarrhea. Both of those are known symptoms of Omicron and not symptoms of a pneumonia vaccine.
One way or another, it’s gonna be a fun few days around here.
This isn’t just a teacher thing, is it? At the end of the day today the principal made a PA announcement that, despite the custodians’ valiant efforts to stay ahead of the snow and cold, the parking lots and sidewalks around the school weren’t as ice-free as they wanted, and reminded everyone that we should be careful while walking to our buses, or our cars, or wherever else we might be walking at the end of the day. A few minutes later, as I was walking to my car, I started musing on how many days off from work I could plausibly take if I slipped and, say, broke a leg or something while on school property. By the time I got to my car the musing had evolved to the point where because I had written an (at the time, nonexistent) blog post describing precisely this scenario work had somehow found it and determined that I broke my leg on purpose, and I was wondering what the consequences of such a thing might be and whether those consequences might mean I got to stay home from work even more.
Back to the original question; this is a standard tired-of-being-at-work thing, right? “How can I hurt myself so I don’t have to come back here” wonderings aren’t just a teacher thing? It wasn’t even that bad of a day, honestly. I’d call it mediocre at worst. It’s just that this is where my brain goes when walking out of work.
And then I got home, parked, went to the mailbox, got the mail, and was greeted at the door by my wife, who asked me to take the trash out to the foot of the driveway, and a minute or two later I was ass over teakettle in the middle of my fucking driveway and yelling words that I typically do not yell at the top of my lungs while outside, and a minute or two after that said wife came running out, not having actually heard me, but having looked out the front window of our house and noticed me crumpled and not moving much with the trash can partially on top of me.
Nothing’s broken. I landed on my left leg and my left hip; I don’t actually remember how I fell, but I don’t think I hit my head and I don’t seem to have any significant bruising or scrapes or anything. I’m not limping when I walk, although my ankle, my toes, my knee and my hip all hurt. It could have been much worse; I had a shot glass in my right coat pocket (don’t ask) and landing on that would probably have been bad.
And, truth be told, my first thought upon regaining my feet and ascertaining that I wasn’t broken was I probably can’t reasonably take tomorrow off because of this, and I was disappointed, because when one makes a fool of oneself in public, one ought to get something out of it other than pain and humiliation.
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