This Is How I Cook Caribbean Black Beans and Rice

• Peppers are basted with olive oyl and in the oven. Now to start on the rice.

• Water's on the stove. Time to chop some stuff while I wait for it to boil.
• Aaaand my shorts are on backwards. This is a good start. I wondered where my pockets were...
• Ack! The cheese fell out of the fridge and attacked me while I was getting the green pepper. Stupid cheese, you're not even a part of this recipe.
• Rice is in! Stirring with my grandma's antique wooden spoon that has been passed down for three generations. I deem this dish worthy of its usage.
• Using about twice as much green pepper as the recipe calls for, because I'm worth it.
• (Also a bit more red pepper because I had this half a red pepper sitting in the back of the fridge that I forgot about, and it'd be a shame not to use it.)
• I am rethinking that first decision. That's a shitload of pepper. Oh, well.
• "Slice the garlic paper-thin with a paring knife." The hell is a paring knife? *Googles*
• Wikipedia: "A small knife with a plain edge blade that is ideal for peeling." Well, all of our knives are either serrated or goddamn gigantic. Guess I'll make do.
  I rescued the rice from being Lawrence Welked in a sea of bubbles. Still a lot of water in there. Going to cook a bit more.
  Garlic's chopped. Thought process: "All right, paper thin... Well, for some very liberal definition of paper thin... Okay, I can make this work... Ah forget it WHACK WHACK WHACK WHACK"
  Sweet mother of plants, this is so much more cilantro than I needed. The recipe calls for three tablespoons and there's like, a fern here.
  Time for another round with the world's shittiest can opener. Black beans, emerge!
  (Also: the "preparation time", meaning before things get into the slow cooker, is 30 minutes for this recipe. Considering that the red peppers have to be baked for an hour before they ever touch the slow cooker, I'm not sure the writers understand how time works.)
  Update: pepper's been ground, cilantro is ready, salt is ready. About to rinse the black beans. (The beans: "BLORP".)
  Halfway through slicing up the peppers baked in oil. Heavens to Murgatroyd, these things are hard to cut.
  I love the SOUND that sautéeing vegetables makes. Just this wonderful crackling, hissing noise.
  Well, the green peppers are going to be a bit firm. I thought putting in the garlic for two minutes was a dumb idea, because it's gonna brown if you have it that long, and the fact that I chopped it up pretty small didn't help. I don't think it'll be that big a deal, though.
  Now comes the payoff, where I ADD ALL THE THINGS
  Cilantro: Bam! Salt and pepper: Wham! Wham! Black beans coming down like an avalanche! Vinegar coming in! Hot sauce, co... hot sauuuuuce. Takes forever to get out of the bottle! Okay, here we go. Everything's in. Now we stir. Wait, I somehow almost forgot the rice. In you go, rice!
  And EVERYTHING IS IN THE COOKER AND ON. NOW WORK YOUR MAGIC, SLOW COOKER.
  
  (Update: It was delicious and I'm still eating it a week later. This went well.)

Syria and the Expansion of Executive Authority

Just a little thing to keep in mind regarding Syria and armed intervention: 

President Obama said today that he would ask Congress for permission before going into Syria, although he maintained that he does not need to do so. That latter fact puts him in the category of every single president since Richard Nixon, all of whom have maintained that the 1973 War Powers Act--pretty much the only piece of legislation on the books, at least as far as I'm aware, that sets realistic limits on the power of the President to commit American troops to combat--is unconstitutional and we don't need it. (Presidents, most notably Ronald Reagan, have usually ignored even that flimsy restraint without consequences.)

If you're concerned about the gradual accumulation of power by the executive branch, which has been happening essentially since the U.S. was created, that's a good place to start. Think about it for a second: Obama is maintaining that he has the power to make war upon a foreign country... and it is a war, if a small and one-sided one, euphemisms be damned... without the consent of Congress. Even though it says right there in the Constitution, in Article I, section 8, clause 11, that Congress shall have the power to declare war.

Any justification of that expansion of Presidential authority must inevitably come back to some form of the following argument: "Well, making war is a big deal. But little things like this, where we only kill a few thousand people while losing perhaps none of our own, that isn't a big deal. Congress doesn't even need to be consulted for something so minor."

You know why the power to make war is vested in the most fractious and squabbling branch of government? Because the founders, in my interpretation, set things up so that when the United States goes to war, there's supposed to be a really, really good reason. Like a "The survival of the country is at stake" kind of reason. This is not it. The most important thing we'll be defending is our credibility. Is that worth killing a few thousand people for? Is that worth making war over?

Coda: Chemical weapons aren't the reason, either. As we just found out, the U.S. is perfectly fine with letting an ally use chemical weapons if it serves our interests, and ignored Saddam's later use of them against his Kurdish population. The fact that we publicly said we didn't want them used is nothing more or less than a threat to our credibility. If the use of chemical weapons is so abhorrent and such a threat to people around the world, why is the United States's closest ally saying "I'm not going to get into that heaping pile of crazy?" Why hasn't the international community responded with something more than empty outrage? Because it doesn't matter. It's an atrocity whether the victims are being killed with bullets or with poison gas.

Again, think about this for a second. The best estimates are that more than one hundred thousand people had died in this war before chemical weapons were ever used, as far as we know. If the deaths of all those people didn't prompt an intervention, why is the use of poison gas going to do it? It's not like the people killed by gas are any more dead than the people blown up with explosives, or killed with knives, or guns, or anything else. The United States made a foreign policy choice not to get into the war when it began, and we've stuck to it for two years, because a) it's hard to see how intervention could end the war in a way that helps, and b) Syria is only marginally relevant to our national interests. The use of a new and different way of killing people does not change those reasons at all.

The Passing of a Bicycle God

Jesus. Christ. 

You guys, I may have actually seen Jesus today. 

It may not have been Jesus. It may have been one of the American Gods, a god of steel and stone and bicycle-tire rubber. Like, a pale shadow of the god across the sea in the old country, from a place of savages and dancing flames where they sacrifice three virgins to a monstrous bicycle idol by the light of the full moon. I don't know. But I really cannot say for certain that this cyclist is not that being.

He was not very impressive to look at. The bike he rode was pale pink, the paint cracked and flaking. The back of his seat, which was the only part of it I saw, was torn and had some stuffing coming out. From what I could tell of the handlebar cords, they were somewhat rusted over. The guy himself wasn't wearing a helmet, just a backwards gangster baseball cap and a black T-shirt with an orange messenger bag slung across his back. His legs were bronze and skinny, maybe as wide around as a large zucchini (singular: zucchin?), and without any real muscle visible to the eye when he was at rest. But when he was on the move, guys, holy fuck.

We were going down the Euclid Corridor, which leads from Cleveland proper into the Outer Rim territories, and goes from city to wasteland to medical palace to suburbs. It's maybe four and a half miles from the city center to the Cleveland Clinic, and this guy was just tearing up the road. I mean it. Chunks of concrete were flying into the road, hitting cars, pedestrians, things were exploding in his wake, as I live and breathe.

My bike has twenty-one gears. I was on gear 19 and he easily, easily, outpaced me. Just sped right on ahead as if I was standing still. Okay, I thought when I caught him at a light, I accept your challenge. Gear 20. And he whizzed right on by me again, without apparent effort. Fine, you fuck, Gear 21 it is. I'll pedal my absolute hardest and I will catch up to you, you bastard, see if I don't. And I kept up with him. Barely. I kept up with him for maybe a mile of stops and starts before he signaled right, sweat shining on his forehead in the sun, veered right and was lost to me.

Fine, I thought. I, sir, will remember you. I raised my hand in salute to his freakish biking ability and watched him recede into the heart of Cleveland Clinic. At this point, in my mind, he was still mortal, not yet godly. The divine light had yet to shine from his eyes and his hands. He was forgotten for all of two minutes, while I struggled up the hill on Cornell, to the little plateau at the intersection of Murray Hill... and there he was again. He'd gone the long way around, who knows how many blocks out of his way, and still made it to my intersection at *precisely the same time as I*.

I was impressed. But the true proof of his divinity lay directly before us. There is a hill, leading down into the heart of Little Italy, whose name has been forgotten by Time. No man can surmount this hill without paying a terrible price, for the old spirits of the hill are wroth at man's feeble attempts to conquer it. Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary never came to the base of Murray Hill, because they could not. It was beyond their power to achieve.

This deity in human flesh attacked the hill as though it were a huge, heaving monster and he the knight to slay it. He raced up the hill, and when I say raced, I mean that Lancelot of the House Steroid could not have caught him. I followed him, spitting obscenities and pedaling like a man possessed. I have never taken that hill at a gear higher than 17, but fuck it, I went to nineteen. I was puffing, wheezing, sweating, pushing as hard as I ever have, blazing up the hill compared to me on any other day, and watching this madman on a bike outrace me like it wasn't even a thing. The trees on the park side of the road were cracking and falling backwards, away from the road, as he went. Cars were being blown off the street. A murder of crows arose behind us and sent up a nightmarish chorus of their rackish caws. Thunder rolled in the sky, time slowed, reality bent, and still he kept on, guys, he kept pounding and grinding to the top of the hill. And then, my friends, do you know what he did?

He kept going.

Like it wasn't even a thing.

I was spent. I was done. I wasn't contemplating just laying down and dying as a thing I really, really wanted to do, but it was definitely one of the options I was obliged to consider. A three-legged, broke-dick dog could've beaten me home from the top of that hill. I was just out. And there goes King Bicycle on his raggedy pink machine, flying ahead like nothing alive until he was lost to view.

I know not what god or demon I followed home from work today, but of this I am certain: it was not of this natural, corporeal earth. No man can do the things I saw him do. It could have been Jesus, it could have been Loki, it could have been some nameless god from the nightmare wild before men had words to clothe it. I don't know. But it's here, in Cleveland, and that means no man is safe. Weep for your little cyclists, men and women. Weep for the cyclists of the world.

Agency and Feminism in Gladiator (And Other Stories)

I'd like to talk a little bit about agency. This, if you're a fan of the humanities, is likely one of your favorite words. If it isn't, then read on, and I'll see if I can put it into some kind of useful perspective.

Agency is the one who does. Agency is the ability of a person, a character, or a people to determine their own destiny. To deny a people agency is to relegate them to helpless victimhood. For example, to describe the Jews who died in the Holocaust, or the Native Americans who died in the Columbian Exchange, as simple victims is to deny their agency. The Jews fought back, ran away, broke through barbed wire, hid, led armed uprisings and, in some cases, acted as police for the Nazis and became some of the most vicious and brutal oppressors of their own people. But whatever they chose, they chose; they were not wholly at the mercy of the Nazis. Various tribes of Native Americans fought, made peace, allied with the U.S. and with its enemies, signed treaties, led an anti-white American religious awakening, formed political entities and unions and resisted American attempts to eject them from their land. Often unsuccessfully, yes, but they chose. They were not wholly at the mercy of their tormentors to the east.*^*

To put this in terms of fictional characters, which is where we will be for most of this post, Tony Stark has agency and Pepper Potts does not.* Stark is a billionaire genius playboy inventor who, when he needs to make a major change in his life, designs an invincible crime-fighting suit and flies halfway around the globe to save helpless souls in Afghanistan. Potts is Tony's secretary. She is intelligent, beautiful, charming and indispensable to Tony, and she also has very few choices in the Iron Man movies about what she does, where she goes or the direction her life will take. She follows Tony. Yes, she occupies a different socioeconomic class than Tony, and thus has less choice over her life's direction; yes, she is a supporting character in a movie, and supporting characters are called that because they don't have a lot of agency. But that's what a character without agency looks like, and in a disturbing number of my favorite movies, women generally have far less agency than men.**

You've heard of gender-swapping, right?*** Where you take a work of fiction and swap the men for women, and vice versa? Well, I had the idea earlier today of keeping the genders the same, but changing which characters have agency. Male characters would be relegated to relatively submissive roles, when they had previously assumed dominant ones, and females would emerge from the shadows to dominate the plot.****

Take one of my favorite movies and one that I recently watched, Ridley Scott's highly decorated Gladiator. There is only one female character worth noting in that movie, and a minute ago, I honestly had to go to the Wikipedia page to look up her name. It's Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), by the way. She spends most of the movie "living in a prison of fear", with mad emperor and brother Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) constantly either trying to seduce her or threatening to harm her son. When exiled ex-general Maximus (Russell Crowe) returns to Rome as a gladiator, she brokers a meeting between him and a sympathetic senator, Gracchus (Derek Jacobi). Other than that, she doesn't do anything worth noting in the movie. The story is about Maximus, not her.

Look at the character of Lucilla, though. Look at the way she acts. When Commodus attempts to seduce her, pressing her down on a bed, her face is impassive, stony. She doesn't say anything. When she finally gets up and walks away, leaving him crumpled on the bed, it feels like a release from prison... but she has to walk back into prison sooner or later, every time she enters his presence in truth. When Commodus obliquely threatens her son and slowly, menacingly explains to Lucilla how her son will die if she doesn't reveal her part in the conspiracy against Commodus, she can only stand there and cry. She doesn't argue back, deny her part or anything similar. When Commodus grandly lays out his vision for the future, which includes marrying and raping Lucilla, she can only sit there and not utter a word. Even when she brings Gracchus and Maximus together to plot against Commodus, she barely says a thing after the introductions; the point is to bring the powerful men together, not for her to speak (even though she's the Emperor's sister and theoretically holds some power herself).

Lucilla completely lacks agency. She would never have worked against Commodus if Maximus had not returned from the dead and given her a champion. And although both Commodus and the former Emperor, Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) praise her ruthlessness and leadership ability, the praise is a hollow echo given her actual role in the film. All of her decisions are based off of Maximus's deeds or centered on fending off Commodus's advances; she has few emotions save for a desire to protect her son and some affection for Maximus, plus fear of her brother. She is not a mover and shaker; that is for the men.

Now consider what an agency-swapped version of Gladiator would look like, even if we left the story intact. Imagine Lucilla taking an active hand in government, arguing with Commodus about the best policies to pursue as Emperor. Imagine her as the center of the conspiracy against Commodus instead of merely its facilitator, reaching out to bring Gracchus and Maximus together and planning their moves against Commodus; imagine her standing up to Commodus, or even fighting him in the arena. (If that's too strong, perhaps assassinating him in one of the MANY OPPORTUNITIES SHE HAS TO DO SO--we see Commodus willingly drinking a sleeping potion that she mixes and hands to him, for example, and barely even asking what it is.) Imagine her taking charge, becoming a political force, the plot of the movie centered around her. That is agency.

I know I have a long way to go when it comes to both writing female characters and thinking about women's and gender studies (WGS) issues, but it seems to me like we have far fewer female characters with agency than we do male characters with agency, both in Gladiator and outside it. A comprehensive evaluation of everything in culture is beyond my abilies, but if anyone can point me towards media in which female characters have the kind of agency I'm looking for--actively driving the plot, not depending on male characters for everything--I would be very interested to see it.



*^*It didn't really fit anywhere in this post, but consider Avatar. That is a perfect example of a movie with an agency-less indigenous population. The Na'vi aren't entirely victims--they end up winning the war, after all--but they only fight back and win because Jake Sully organizes them and gets them to do so. Imagine a movie depicting a helpless, primitive, frightened tribe of Cherokee who is at the mercy of the U.S. Army until Daniel Boone swoops in and saves them, and how that would play in the current politically correct environment. For an encore lesson in how cultural values change over time, imagine the version of Avatar that would've been made 200-ish years ago, when Andrew Jackson was warring against the Seminoles in Florida and kicking the Cherokee out of Georgia. That Avatar would most likely have celebrated the virtues of white expansion and lionized Jackson fighting against the savages. Now one of the most ballyhooed movies of the 2000s depicts a native tribe successfully defeating white oppressors, with white leadership no less. Man, cultures change a lot over time.

*Disclaimer: I haven't seen Iron Man 3, so take this paragraph as applying to Iron Man 1, 2 and The Avengers only.

**For another example, consider Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and the character of Penny, who is powerless until Captain Hammer helps her open a new homeless shelter, and spends the movie being sought-after by two men. Imagine a movie where she actively played her suitors off against each other.

***This wasn't what I was looking for definition-wise, but it's really interesting, if a bit
outdated. http://users.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/genderswap.html

****Yes, I get that not all movies feature men alone determining the action, and that to say so is as sexist as if it were actually a thing. It just occurred to me recently, though, that in The Prestige, Gladiator, Collateral and several others of my absolute favorite movies--which tend to be about guys, for guys--female characters are side characters while men drive the plot. That's where this post is coming from, and what this paragraph refers to. It doesn't mean they aren't fantastic movies that I love; it means, though, that they have hidden flaws in spite of that.

Last Thoughts From FEMA Corps

I feel like there’s not a lot left to say, in terms of having a final FEMA Corps sum-up catch-all blog post. Most of the things I could say have either been said already in this space, or else they’d just feel redundant being expressed here. So let’s throw out a final list, say, of a few things that I’ve learned in the past ten months.

-Horrible puns are a never-dying form of entertainment. (my team may disagree with this.)

-The South is green and full of funny bugs.

-There’s nothing so pathetic as a team that has lost its cohesion.

-People, specifically Americorps people, are capable of astounding acts of friendliness and generosity, made all the more amazing by their apparent and complete lack of seeming put-upon.

-Communication may just be the most important thing there is. If you can’t talk about the important things with your family, friends or team members, you might as well not be talking about anything at all.

-There’s a ridiculous amount of talent in the Corps, stuff we only see occasionally. Artists, painters, writers, musicians, football players, Frisbee players, swimmers, martial artists, EMTs, jugglers, the list is almost endless. They’re everywhere. Americorps got a good group together, here.

-Building off that, it turns out that people who want to spend a year doing community service are generally pretty awesome individuals. Sean, Rii, Jimbob, Ashvin, Michella, Badger, Tommy, Michael, John, Malinda, Katrina, Chelsea, Shaun, John Joyce, Joey, Christina, ‘Bama and everyone else… thanks for being wonderful, and thanks for being my friends.

-There’s nothing more important than leadership when you’re talking about an Americorps team, and there’s nothing more painfully evident then when it fails.

-If you can’t fit it into a red bag or your backpack, it’s probably not necessary for you to live, at least in the lifestyle we take pride in.

-Your van is your home. Treat it accordingly.

-If you don’t make an effort to understand or interact with the people around you, you’ll have a shitty, lonely experience. That’s just how it works. You’re responsible for your own social outreach.

-Bloodless language beats you down. By the end of the year, I was speaking in a ‘initiative’ and ‘moving forward’ and ‘not as good as we would’ve liked’ FEMA/NCCC/generic-corporate timid linguistic jambalaya like everybody else. It’s so hard to say anything straight out in this culture.

-Sometimes, when you join Americorps, you meet the president. Sometimes, when you meet the president, you look like an utter goon. Sometimes, when you look like an utter goon in your most-publicized photo with said president, it gets promulgated all over FEMA Corps, and NCCC, and FEMA too, and you have to explain every time someone sees it that that’s just the way your mouth works when you smile and you simply are not good at pictures. So it goes.

-There’s nothing cuter than Amerelationships. Dalton and Katrina, Joe and Tiffy, Malinda and Chris, I’m looking at you.

-A lot of things you’d never consider eating, or at least would have quite a bit of distaste for, become your dietary staples and even enjoyable because that’s what’s on the damn table tonight, eat it or don’t.

-I can’t wait to be cooking and buying everything I eat. Seriously.

-Getting an account with a local Mississippi bank in the early days of the program was a really dumb idea. Get a national bank, for crap’s sake.

-There is always time to throw the Frisbee around.

-My housing wasn’t my housing until the Battlestar Galactica flag was up on the wall.

-I used to think that FEMA Corps was secretly an indirect subsidy for Wal-Mart, since that’s generally where our groceries come from (or someplace else really cheap). Now I know better. The federal government is really using us to prop up Extended Stay Motels.

-Oatmeal’s a pretty awesome breakfast food if you do it right, and also if that’s the only thing the motel provides in the morning, so like it (see above).

-I read, at some point during the year, this funny and instructive little catechism: when liberals think of government, they think of Social Security and Medicaid. When conservatives think of government, they think of the IRS and the DMV. After working with FEMA for eight months, well, let’s just say I can see both sides of the argument pretty well now.

-I’ve said this before on here, but here it is again: Never, ever, ever will I buy a house or live in an apartment that would be flooded if anything less than a tsunami came through my municipality. Put me on a hill, I’ll risk the lightning strikes. At least you don’t have to muck and gut the home and make sure every last particle of mold and every granule of damp plasterboard and wood is removed from your empty shell of a basement before you can even think about rebuilding after one of those.

-There’s nothing that just slowly sucks the life and the energy out of you like having nothing… whatsoever… to do at work.

-The Upper End is a shitty bar, but it’s the only game in Vicksburg, so sometimes you just have to go anyway. Unless, that is, you want to go to a casino and leave in the morning owning nothing but your pants.

-If you want something done right, bloody well do it yourself or give it to one of the competent people around you to do. Anything else is a waste of a task.

-You could not pay me to live in New York City. Seriously, if I was offered a good job on condition of moving there, I would turn it down in a minute unless I could a) work from another state or b) there is no b. Nearly five months was far, far more than enough to convince me of this.

-Personal space is a finite and negotiable commodity.

-Leadership is communication. If you’re not communicating, and well, you’re not leading.

-There’s nothing more nightmarish than driving through Manhattan, after a hurricane, with no power in the city, lit only by reddish flares, when you have no earthly idea where to go because you’ve never been here before and your housing is in New Jersey.

-Atlanta is an awesome city, New York is horrible, Frederick (MD) is pretty nice, Vicksburg (MS) is charming, Anniston (AL) seemed cool, Emmitsburg (MD) was alright and Hartford (CT) would probably have been nice if we had been there for more than a day.

-There’s no geek-out moment quite like the one where you notice you’ve been driving from Frederick to Winchester, VA daily… and that you cross Antietam Creek and the Potomac River in the process… as you go down the Shenandoah Valley… past Harper’s Ferry and just a hair away from Sharpsburg and Gettysburg… yeaaaaaaaah. All the Civil War history you could possibly ever want, well, you’re driving through it.

Final Five, the important ones:

-Living on a ship is awesome.

-Sometimes, you meet the most wonderful and important people in your life by total random chance.

-If you want something done right, bloody well do it yourself or give it to one of the competent people around you. Giving it to an incompetent person only wastes time.

-Having said that, you can only do so much.

-I’ll never forget this year, this place and these people.  

Isaac Asimov's Fantastic Voyage is the Most Astonishingly Sexist Thing in the World

When I first read Fantastic Voyage, I instinctively blamed it on the 1950s. While researching the book for this post, I learned that it came out in 1966, and was appalled. The lone female character, Cora Peterson, is as helpless a put-upon sex object as I have ever seen in any medium. The book isn't even eligible for the Bechdel Test because there's no other female character she can converse with. Her activities consist of the following: puppy-like adoration for her boss, iciness towards the male protagonist, screaming, being an assistant, screaming, being useless in emergencies, screaming some more, and finally warming up to the protagonist after he saves her life a few times.

This is Cora Peterson. She is the assistant of one Dr. Duval, and is described as such. She is twenty-four years old, has a master's degree and is an experienced medical technician. And yet, when Grant first sees her in person... this happens.

[An Army superior] was talking in a low voice, carefully controlled. "And aside from that, doctor, what is she doing here?"
"Miss Cora Peterson," said Duval [the doctor], icily, "is my assistant. Where I go professionally, she accompanies me professionally."
"This is a dangerous mission..."
"And Miss Peterson has volunteered, understanding full well its dangers."
"A number of men, entirely qualified to help, have also volunteered. Matters would be far less complicated if one of those men accompanied you. I will assign you one."
[Duval launches into long description of how Peterson is "a third and fourth arm" to him, and a very capable technician and he needs her]
Grant's eye moved to Cora Peterson again. She looked acutely embarrassed, yet stared at Duval with the expression Grant had once seen in a beagle's eye when its little boy owner returned from school. Grant found that intensely annoying. (35)

To review: a superior officer tries to keep Peterson from coming along for no reason other than her gender. Instead of defending herself, she stands meekly by and lets Duval speak for her. Later on, when the officer is speaking to a colleague alone, he tosses off this exchange:

"What's wrong with the girl, Cora Peterson?"
"Nothing, why?"
"Your voice was loud enough... Do you know of any reason why she shouldn't be on board?"
"She's a woman. She may not be reliable in emergencies. Besides... [the doctor is an ass, and I objected at him because reasons]." (44)

Please note "the girl". There's no reason on earth why Peterson is a "girl" instead of a woman, to pick out the least disturbing thing about that passage, and yet that's what male characters call her throughout the book. Oh, and on page 54, she thanks Duval for "arranging to have me come", and apologizes to him for being "the cause of unpleasantness between yourself and Dr. Reid". Sigh.


At the book's beginning, Peterson is cool towards Grant and attracted to Duval, the main male authority figure in her life. At its end, she is warm towards Grant and they leave hand in hand. What happens in between?

Grant hits on her mercilessly and unprofessionally throughout the first half of the whole novel. There's some odd male gender issue here where Grant plays himself up to her as a masculine lug instead of an intelligent human, and that shows up in this exchange:

"If you have any footballs you want strung, you let me know. Us physical types are good at that kind of unskilled work."
Cora put down a small screwdriver, brushed her rubber-gloved fingers together and said "Mr. Grant?"
"Yes, ma'am?"
"Are you going to make this entire voyage hideous with your notion of fun?"
"No, I won't, but... Well, how do I talk to you?"

"Like a fellow member of the crew."
"You're also a young woman."
"I know that, Mr. Grant, but what concern is that of yours? It's not necessary to assure me with every remark and gesture that you're aware of my sex. It's wearisome and unnecessary. After this is all over, if you still feel called upon to go through whatever rituals you are accustomed to performing before young women, I will deal with you in whatever fashion seems advisable but for now..."
"All right. It's a date, for afterward." (51)

So that happens. One would think Grant would have learned his lesson, but on the next page...

"Oh, if you could only frivol," he breathed, and fortunately she didn't hear him, or, at least, showed no signs of having done so.
Without warning, she placed his hand on his... [and moves it out of the way of a laser].
Grant said, "You might have warned me."
Cora said, "There is no reason for you to be standing here, is there?"
She lifted the laser, ignoring his offered help and turned toward the storeroom.
"Yes, miss," said Grant, humbly. "When near you henceforward I shall be careful where I place my hand."
Cora looked back as though startled and rather uncertain. Then, for a moment, she smiled.
Grant said "Careful. The cheeks may crack."
Her smile vanished at once. "You promised," she said, icily, and moved into the workroom. (52)

So a few takeaways here:
-'Seriously, shut up, I'm a member of the crew like you are.' 'Okay, pardon me while I flirt with you some more.'
-Note the language in Cora's long speech. It's part of her icy (continually described as icy, cold or, on page 93, "the ice-queen of some polar region lit by a blue-green aurora") demeanor. Read: professionalism.
-This isn't the last time Cora randomly touches Grant. She leans over him to plug in his seatbelt, and later clings to him desperately when Grant saves her during turbulence in the sub.
-Also, Cora is called by her first name throughout the novel, including by the narrator, after Grant asks her if he can. Nobody else is. Everyone else ('everyone else' is all males) goes by their last name.
-Grant is also constantly watching her and making "appreciative inner comment[s] about her beauty" (107) throughout the first third of their journey, whenever he has a chance.

From this point on, the dominant subplot of the book is Cora screaming and Grant saving her from things, and continuing to flirt with her. (Cora yanks Grant's seatbelt. "I was checking to see if you were being tightly held." "Only by the harness, but thanks." (65))

Here are a few:

The approach of the next [whirlpool] made Cora scream in shrill terror. (85)

[Grant saves her from sliding across the floor into a wall, or something, as she] clutched at his shoulder and seized the material of his uniform with viselike desperation. (86)

The laser over the working counter was swinging loose on one hook, its plastic cover off.
"Didn't you bother securing it?" demanded Grant.
Cora nodded wildly, "I did! I did secure it! I swear it. Heavens..."
"Then how could it..."
"I don't know. How can I answer that?"
Duval was behind her, his eyes narrowed and his face hard. He said, "What has happened to the laser, Miss Peterson?"
Cora turned to meet the new questioner. "I don't know. Why do you all turn on me?" [more brouhaha]
[Owens comes in] "My God, the laser!"
"Don't you start," screamed Cora, eyes now swimming in tears. (107-8)

And at that moment, the lifeline twitched and snaked upward, its end flashing past, and out through the opening.
Cora screamed, and kicked herself desperately towards the opening.
Michaels pursued. "You can't do anything," he panted. "Don't be foolish..." (117)

[After getting thrown across the lymphatic system] She was managing to breathe now and heard her own name. Someone was calling. Carefully, she made a pleading sound. Encouraged by the sound of her voice, she screamed as shrilly as she could: "Help! Everybody! Help!" (149) (This is at least sensible, but she doesn't try to free herself when she gets stuck or anything, just waits for Grant.)

[When saved from that predicament and back in the ship after nearly getting squashed by antibodies] Cora was breathing in deep, shuddering gasps. Gently, Duval removed her headpiece, but it was to Grant's arm she clung as she suddenly burst into tears.
"I was so scared," she sobbed. (154)

This is what happens. And it's not like she's performing feats of heroism in the meantime, either. Every heroic deed-doing surgery, piloting the ship, rescuing people, resupplying with oxygen, etc.-is done by Grant or Owens or Duval. And Grant just keeps hitting on her and hitting on her, eventually with her consent. Eventually she 'warms up', that is, she begins to respond to his advances.

[She's lying on a cot] "I'm all right now. I'm just malingering, lying here."
"Why not? You're the most beautiful malingerer I've ever seen. Let's malinger together for a minute, if you don't think that sounds too improper."
She smiled in her turn. "It would be difficult for me to complain that you were too forward. After all, you seem to make a career of saving my life."
"All part of a shrewd and extraordinarily subtle campaign to place you under an obligation to me."
"I am! Most decidedly!"
"I'll remind you of that at the proper time."
"Please do. --But Grant, really, thank you." (157-8)

 Does that sound massively creepy to anyone else, bantering or no? But by the end of the book, Grant and Cora are leaving the military base "hand in warm hand" (186). She's no longer an "ice-queen", and she's no longer excessively formal with Grant. She also displays no traces of her previous attachment to Duval. In short, the hour (or few hours) they spend together changes her entire personality with regards to Grant. She falls for him because of his relentless flirting and because he saves her life several times; she's a bag of useless female-ness at every critical moment in the book; she is continually belittled and disrespected by her colleagues and superiors and seems to accept it as normal (except for one irritated speech to Grant), and she ends up with Grant like a good love-interest should. As Clay Davis might put it, sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit.

Passion

What do I want to be when I grow up?

If you are currently shoveling your way through the muck of high school, or bursting into college to find new discoveries in every shining day, or making your way for the first time in the cutting, formal, salaried world of professional employment, then I daresay it is not too much presumption to say that like me, this question has perhaps crossed your mind once or twice. If you are like me in more specific ways, this question has bothered you ever since it became clear that school would not last forever, and no matter how drawn-out and full of painful self-discovery it was, that it was an incubator you were loath to leave. You asked yourself that question and then shrank from it, burying your unease in your studies and in the endless minutiae of social interaction. Only when you were forced to take notice, by the oncoming wall of college applications or the flat barrier of college graduation or the end of an Americorps term, did you seriously consider the most childishly simple question of them all as the stunningly life-defining choice that it actually was. And if you're like me, you've made it this far without ever quite articulating an answer, be it in your head or by your actions or to your relatives or to the world. 

The answer is supposed to be found in the things you love to do, your passion. Now, there's a word that's been turned inside out. Passion is for lovers, for stolen kisses, for spicy-hot endearments whispered in the night, not for the bloodless prose of cover letters and résumés that reduce a person to a set of numbered accomplishments. Passion has no place in the antiseptic land of results and paychecks. Yet they say you're supposed to follow your passion, to take what you love and make it something you can live on. Follow your passions, they say, and do what you love. And my answer has always been the same. 'How can I? I have so many.'

I was always sort of jealous of people who knew, unequivocally, what they wanted. It didn't have to be employable, rational, or remotely accomplishable. I envied those people who had married their talents to their desires in such a way as to lay their chosen path out before their feet. Hell, I knew a guy in high school who wanted to be a professional bowler. Eighteen years old and he wanted to bowl for a living, because that's what he liked and it's what he was good at. I'll not sneer at bowlers, but theirs isn't exactly a life most of us envy. But I envied him, because right or wrong, he was walking a path. He was following a dream, the way you see people do in the movies. I have no idea if he made it or not. 

I never had that in high school. I just knew I was going to college, and presumably I'd figure out the rest of my life in the next four years, emerging from my chrysalis with a degree and a plan. Instead I chose English as a major, precisely because I figured it would enable me to hold off on the choice a little longer. Everyone loves a writer, said the liberal-arts angel on my shoulder, and that skill will let me get into any number of potential careers. (If all this sounds head-slappingly naïve, well, I was. I didn't hear the song "What Do You Do (With A B.A. in English)?" until it was far too late to switch.) 

All around me, people were getting their shit together, or at least seeming to. My best friends went to law school, one after another. People were picking something they liked, something they enjoyed and wanted to do. My problem is that I could never choose among the many, many subjects I enjoy. In my heart, I've always loved being a dabbler in many things, a master of none. Communication, there's something enjoy. Writing. Writing essays, blog posts, academic papers, haikus, six-word obituaries, fifty-page theses. There are very few things I don't like to write, let's put it that way. But that's not a realistic, steady, salaried life direction. Passion only gets you so far if you also want the stability that a real-person job can bring. 

That brings me up to the present day. I'm applying for things all over the country, things I really want to do, jobs I never imagined people having. (My current favorite is that of an anthromorphic cat-person that writes about science for children, even though it really is an unreachable dream job for someone with my just-out-of-college-and-not-really-applicable-anyway qualifications, even though I know I would be happier writing and researching for a living than just about anything else.) I'm looking for a passion, not because I don't have any of my own to go out and live with, but because I need a cause to throw myself behind. I don't much care what it is. I have these general ideas of wanting to make a difference, wanting to help people in some way, somewhere in the world of nonprofits or politics or (heaven forfend) salaried writing, but I don't know how to translate that into real life. And I know that nobody does, which just makes me more and more irritated that I can't figure it out and others are making it work somehow. That's the passion that I have, dissipated and undirected as yet, but indisputably there. Point me at a target and I'll give you all I have. I just need to know where to begin. Or, more accurately and honestly, I want someone to tell me where to begin.

I know what I'm supposed to be doing right now. I'm supposed to be figuring it out. And I'm doing my damndest, trust me. I'm trying to remember that this decision-of where to get my first real-world job, that is-is only one step in a long, long chain, and that the process and product of that long chain of decisions doesn't establish my identity or make me more or less of a person than any other facet of my life. But it's hard to think that way when all you want to do is go and live on your own like people in your age group are supposed to be doing, not staying at your parents' home for the twenty-third summer in a row while you figure your life out. It all starts with the job, for me, and that's what I'm trying to get to-and the job and the passion don't have to necessarily coincide. It's a first step, not a life-defining choice. One big part of this time in my life is remembering that.