#someone told me they might even make him repay all two years of my wages because he has no payslips to prove he paid me | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

theliberaltony · 6 years

Link

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

n the year since President Trump pulled off his stunning upset of Hillary Clinton, Democrats have blamed the result on all kinds of factors: James Comey’s letter, Russian hackers, voter suppression, Jill Stein’s candidacy and depressed African-American turnout, to name a few. The truth? In an election decided by fractions of percentage points, it’s easy to call just about anything a difference-maker.

But none of that gets at the heart of why so many people who cast a ballot for former president Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 — and who saw Trump as unqualified to be president — nonetheless voted for him. Although it’s far from a microcosm of the nation, there’s one place that I believe illustrates what happened in 2016 better than anything else.

In a nation increasingly composed of landslide counties — places that voted for one side or the other by at least 20 percentage points — Howard County, Iowa (population 9,332), stands out as the only one of America’s 3,141 counties that voted by more than 20 percentage points for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016. Democrats can’t credibly blame Howard County’s enormous 41-point swing in just four years on a last-minute letter to Congress, voter ID laws or Russia-sponsored Facebook ads.

Howard County, about 150 miles northeast of Des Moines along the state’s border with Minnesota, is 98 percent white. Only 13 percent of residents age 25 and over hold at least a bachelor’s degree. Median household income in the county in 2015 was $49,869. The largest employers in Cresco, the county seat, include the Donaldson Company, an air filter manufacturer whose local workers belong to the United Auto Workers union, and Featherlite, which makes aluminum livestock and utility trailers.

Barack Obama speaks to members of the United Auto Workers union during a presidential campaign stop in Dubuque, Iowa, in 2007.

AP IMAGES

Contrary to the “Trump Country” stereotype, Howard County isn’t drowning in manufacturing job losses, high unemployment or an opioid crisis. In fact, its unemployment rate the month before the election was just 2.9 percent. The main gripe? Stagnant wages — and a gnawing feeling that people have been working harder and for longer hours while other parts of the country reaped much bigger rewards during the recovery from the Great Recession.

“When Trump said, ‘What the hell do you have to lose?’ a lot more people heard it than just African-Americans,” said Pat Murray, a Democrat who worked 29 years as a press brake operator at Donaldson and now serves on the Howard County Board of Supervisors. “Our wages have been stagnant, and our insurance has gone backwards,” he told me, citing the union-sponsored health plan’s surging deductibles. “We work 50, 60 hours a week because there’s no one to hire.”

“[Obama] saved us from another Great Depression, but it never really got back to the working class,” said Murray, who calls himself “as anti-Trump as they come” but says Clinton’s campaign took places like Howard County for granted in the November election. “The average Joe Blow isn’t hung up on the stock market. Democrats always say we’re going to fight for the working people. The last few elections, we haven’t shown that at all.”

Howard County, Iowa, encompasses a number of small towns like Lime Springs (left), Cresco (center) and Chester.

Bill Whittaker / Jon Roanhaus / Bobak Ha’Eri

Autopsies of the Clinton campaign frequently cite her inattention to Michigan and Wisconsin as a cause of her loss. But her failure to connect in places like Howard County probably had less to do with which states she visited — after all, she spent plenty of time in Iowa — and more to do with her image and message.

Clinton came to be seen as establishment and dishonest in a year when a plurality of voters wanted change. But in a baffling display of obliviousness, she spent much of the fall jetting between big-city rallies, which were often followed by closed-door, high-dollar fundraisers. She spent precious little time making her economic case before people in midsize cities or small towns like Cresco. And even though she outspent Trump $6.5 million to $2.2 million on Iowa’s airwaves, her ads were more about Trump’s antics than about how she would raise voters’ wages or how Trump might lower them — effectively ceding that ground to Trump’s utopian jobs promises and inescapable slogan.

Neil Shaffer, a farmer and watershed conservation official who chairs the county GOP, credits Trump with flipping the party’s script on trade. “We’re skeptical of career politicians,” he said, likening Trump’s outsider appeal in the so-called Driftless Region to that of former-wrestler-turned-Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura. “For however many years, Democrats and union leaders denounced NAFTA. All of a sudden, you had a Republican candidate saying that it’s all for big business. The average working person said, ‘Hey, here’s someone who’s not going by the party book, he’s breaking the mold.'”

As for Clinton? “She was elitist, was what I kept hearing,” said Laura Hubka, a Navy veteran and ultrasound technician who chaired the county’s Democratic party and knocked on doors for Clinton. “We’re a blue-collar town.”

Voters in Iowa show their support for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump during the 2016 election.

GETTY IMAGES

Last month, Hubka resigned her post as chair and published a scathing blog post about Democrats’ aloofness to voters in places like Howard County and the party’s failure to come to grips with the election result. “Can we just stop and admit we’re part of the problem?” she vented to me. “People who were longtime supporters didn’t want to hear what we had to say anymore.”

Holly Rasmussen was one of those who had reached a breaking point. An Obama voter, Rasmussen cited the way that ill-tailored new federal rules applied to her tiny Cresco cosmetology school as a driving factor in her defection to Trump. “Honestly, when we founded the school, I got to teach. But the last few years, I had to spend all day in my office because I’ve had to file campus crime reports,” she said. “And if we had two people who didn’t repay their loans out of the eight students we had, [the Department of Education] made it tougher for us to get financial aid. Because of the regulations, we had to close. Now, we’re just a salon and spa.”

So why did Rasmussen vote for Obama and Trump? “Just to shake up Washington, to be honest. We’ve been in a rut for so long. People here don’t want to be multi-gajillionaires. They just want to get paid a decent wage,” she said, noting that her 2016 choice “might have been different” had Bernie Sanders won the nomination.

Howard County wasn’t always a train wreck for Clinton. Ironically, in the epic 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Clinton ran as the candidate of labor and small-town America, rallying union halls, downing whiskey and beer for the cameras, and blasting Obama’s speeches as “elitist and out of touch.” She came in third place statewide and only carried 22 of Iowa’s 99 counties in that year’s caucuses. But Howard was one of the 22 she won.

By 2016, however, Howard County morphed into Sanders territory. The Vermont senator struck a nerve with his calls for a working-class revolution and his attacks on Clinton’s Wall Street ties and shifting rhetoric on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

“I was shocked. I didn’t think a person would show up for Bernie,” said Murray, who chaired his precinct’s caucus. “But when I showed up, it was full of Bernie people.”

One such Bernie-crat was Mike Bigley, who spent 30 years as a Donaldson machinist and worked his way up from shop steward to president of UAW Local 120.1 “I liked his ideas on healthcare and free tuition,” said Bigley. “On caucus night, we had a majority for Bernie. Some of the union guys thought Clinton did crooked stuff to win [the nomination]. You hear a lot of things around the factory floor.”

“The Bernie people thought Hillary stole it,” concedes Murray, who said those voters’ distrust of Clinton carried over to November. “I’d say probably two-thirds of them went to Trump,” Murray said. Bigley, a self-described die-hard Democrat, said he wasn’t among them.

A Clinton supporter, left, and the candidate herself in Iowa in 2016.

GETTY IMAGES

By the fall, anti-Clinton fervor in the community had reached a crescendo. The week before the election, emboldened Trump supporters took out a full-page newspaper ad and rented out the historic, city-owned Cresco Theatre and Opera House — a long-ago vaudeville haunt — for screenings of conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary “Hillary’s America” and the Benghazi film “13 Hours.” To Democrats’ dismay, the theater was packed.

For years to come, pundits and political scientists will debate whether working-class white voters’ sharp turn towards Trump had more to do with economic or racial resentment. Incidentally, despite its nearly all-white population, Howard County occupies a unique place in the history of America’s attitudes on race.

Riceville, on the western edge of Howard County, happens to be where, in 1968, elementary school teacher Jane Elliott pioneered the famous “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” classroom exercise that’s still used in diversity training courses today. Elliott’s exercise caused an uproar in the tiny town, made her an outcast in the teacher’s lounge and even resulted in violence and racial epithets aimed at her family. Now 83 and living a few miles down the road in Osage, Elliott told me she blames Trump’s election on a backlash against “eight years of a black man in the White House.”

But neither Howard County’s party chairs nor its left-leaning labor leaders cited racial resentment as a driving force behind the community’s seismic shift to Trump in 2016. “That pail doesn’t hold water,” said Shaffer, the GOP chairman, who eagerly points out that the county voted overwhelmingly for the nation’s first African-American president — twice.

The idea that voters who previously cast a ballot for Obama could not have been motivated, at least in part, by race when they made their 2016 choice has been disputed extensively in academic studies. But in my conversations with Howard County voters of both parties, the common thread of support for Obama and for Trump was resounding: anti-elitism.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump arrives to speak at an Iowa campaign event in 2016.

GETTY IMAGES

Democrats’ next path to 270 Electoral College votes may not run through Iowa. After all, Trump prevailed by a slightly larger margin in the Hawkeye State than he did in Texas. But Democrats don’t have the luxury of simply writing off voters like the ones they lost in Howard County.

If Democrats want to retake the House in 2018, they’ll need to win congressional districts like Iowa’s 1st, which includes Howard County.2 The 1st District narrowly re-elected rough-around-the-edges GOP Rep. Rod Blum last November. More importantly, Howard County’s Trump-curious Democrats have countless analogs in states that will decide the 2020 election: not just in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but in Minnesota and Maine as well.

One year later, Rasmussen, the cosmetology school owner who previously voted for Obama, doesn’t have “massive regrets” about her vote for Trump. “For the most part, he’s doing a good job. I wish sometimes he’d stifle his Twitter account, but I’m not surprised by any of it. If you watched it, that’s kind of how he was,” she shrugged.

To rebuild lost trust and win support, future Democrats face the twin challenges of, first, persuading voters that Trump is on track to negatively affect their livelihoods and, second, reclaiming the mantle of working-class hero that every successful Democratic nominee has embraced since vaudeville ruled the stage at the Cresco Theatre.

“My dad told me, ‘You’ll never be rich enough to be a true-blue Republican,’” Bigley recalled. “Now there’s too much darn money in politics, on both sides.” His advice to his party? “Get out here in the sticks and roll around with us common folks for a week or two.”

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #David Wasserman

1 note · View note

workingontravel · 5 years

Text

“Why do you travel so much?”

(You can read a��Swedish translation of this text here.) A couple of years ago, I realised that one of the people waiting for the same plane from Paris to Stockholm was a colleague, choreographer Dinis Machado. As we started talking about our lives, he told me of the hardships in a year of constant touring. There was something about the way he told it that is emblematic of a life that has been mine and still is for many of my friends. I began thinking about what it means for us to have this collective yet potentially lonely experience of intense travel for work. So the encounter with Dinis at an airport in Paris was somehow the starting point for this interview project. Because of this, he was the first person I wanted to interview. I asked him how he experiences his relationship to travelling; the history and future of that relationship. His answers gave me many stories. Here are a few of them.

Dinis Machado: My identity is based on processes of moving. With this I mean that my entire private life is adapted to migration as such, rather than to just touring for work.

I moved from my hometown Porto, the second biggest city in Portugal, in 2005, when I was eighteen. My passage through Lisbon was very formative in how I make art, but I always felt like a tourist there. Moving to the capital from the second biggest city, I was viewed a bit like a wannabe. The social networks I started building in Lisbon were, of course, much more fragile than for someone who had lived there all their life. At the same time, this anonymity had an amazing side. I moved to Lisbon at around the same time I came out as a gay person. I don’t know if it was a tactic really – I moved there because of art, but discovering my sexuality while being away from everything that was me before meant something to my possibilities of experimentation. New relationships happened in synchronicity with a new identity. We are in a time when sexuality is changing a lot. There are these apps that everyone uses. People have a very non-monogamic life in that sense. But I don’t think they always claim it politically. They do it on the side, in the dark, in the back corridor. I think because I don’t have a family pattern holding me in place, I allow myself to claim it. And my art is also more and more about that. This said, I am very interested in alternative ways of thinking about relationships, not only as a result of all my travelling, but also from the very beginning of my life. From the moment you stop believing that a relationship is only one thing, you also start to see the multiplicity of social structures. You can see what a relationship actually contains, with or without sex, cinema, talking about personal problems… Different structures and different qualities of intimacy interest me. The economic crisis in Portugal escalated when I was living in Lisbon. Even my mother, who is a primary school teacher working for the government, had her salary reduced. The salaries no longer adapted to inflation, and new taxes were added, so people were actually receiving less money. While I was establishing myself as an artist, it was more and more difficult to live on it. There was very little state funding for the arts. Institutions that used to have it lost it, and went for the project grants. Starting artists like me could not enter anymore. I always got money from a private foundation, but never from the government. The first year I applied, I was number three on the list of people closest to getting it, and when I left Portugal in 2012, when the crisis peaked, I was thirty places down.

This was a consequence of the right-wing politics inspired by the debt repayment requests from the IMF. But the loans that caused Portugal’s debt were used in a way that didn’t give anything of what the richer countries in Europe have. Repaying them just made things worse. At times, unemployment was around 40% for people below the age of 35. People were losing their houses to the banks, and foreigners bought a lot of the real estate. The percentage of apartments turned into Airbnbs in Portugal is just insane.

Nowadays, they consider the country to have recovered, because there are less unemployed people. But the jobs are stuff like baking, making beds or handing out keys for Airbnbs. There is low unemployment, but everyone has a 600€ job (which is the minimum wage in Portugal). All the big profits are leaving the country or going to the few who are already wealthy. Portugal’s situation is, in a way, approaching that of countries like Brazil, where the gap between rich and poor is widening.

For these reasons, it became more and more absurd for me to try to make a living from art. I was fed up, but I didn’t want to drop all my efforts and work in a café somewhere. So, I was moving more and more, within Portugal and sometimes abroad. No one really knew where I lived. I spent as little money as I could on accommodation, renting only when it was absolutely necessary for work. In the end, the only funding I could get in Portugal was a grant to work abroad. When I decided to leave Portugal, I had come to the conclusion that I shouldn’t start new relationships there. I suspended any attachment. Doing another art education was a shortcut to a context where I could continue to produce my work, while taking it easier for a while. I had been struggling so much. That is how I ended up in Sweden. But as a foreigner, you can’t get Swedish funding for studies. And the cost of living in Sweden is three times higher than in Portugal. Together with my mother, I managed to convince a bank to lend me 500€ per month for two years to study. I knew that it was practically impossible to live on that, but I just made a leap into the dark. This loan had a ticking clock built into it. Every month, I received less because they deducted the interest for the money I had already borrowed. So even though I started out with 500€/month, it was about 350€ towards the end of the two years. By that time, I was living on a boat with a nice community of students and artists. It was fucking cold in the winter, but in a way I loved it. But towards the second year, my situation got complicated, because my loan had shrunk a lot. I couldn’t get funding for my work in Sweden since I was a student. So I got jobs: as a bike messenger, as a nude model… But I still didn’t want to quit art or my studies to make a living. In the end, I asked to get the money from the loan faster. I took out the last 3000€ at once and bought a caravan. I parked it close to a public swimming pool in Stockholm where I had a gym membership. I lived there and used the showers at the swimming pool. Both the boat and the caravan were tough and lonely experiences in a way. But they were also extremely liberating. I allow myself to take risks now, because I know I can get by on very little. It will still be ok – or not ok, because it’s a very precarious way of living. But I resisted a certain minimum bourgeois life style by crossing these lines, and it made me conscious of how all of Europe is divided through them. Everyone in the EU supposedly has the same rights, but we know that this is’nt true. The southern countries do all the manual labour that the northern countries don’t want to do. Then, my life changed again. The Cullberg Ballet/Life Long Burning was offering this one-off grant for young choreographers and I got it. It allowed me to work, get new funding and do a production that was invited to the ImPulsTanz festival. That, in turn, led to a lot of touring. I’m still very much a touring artist. I tour to small venues, institutional festivals, places in South America… a bit outside the central European circuit. Maybe the fact that they don’t book me as much there has to do with that DIY aesthetics that they might lack some understanding for, because their material base is so different from mine. I do almost everything myself. My stage sets all fit in to a travelling bag, and they are small, foldable or inflatable. My friend says I will be a tent engineer when I stop being a dancer. Everything travels with me, and nothing is disposable. All this tent-ness of my work is practical for touring, but it’s also connected to the precariousness of my life. I very rarely stay in hotels. I tour with so little money. If a friend doesn’t host me, I usually book Airbnbs, despite what I have seen this business model doing to Portugal. Apart from my sets, I travel very lightly: my computer, one or two pairs of trousers and jumpers, seven t-shirts, seven pairs of socks, seven pairs of underwear. I “drag” normality in a way. As a performer, people have so many opinions about every step you take. I don’t feel I have the space to make statements. Even here in Stockholm, I use the same amount of clothes. I got used to it when touring. I own more extrovert and less masculine garments that I really like, but I use them mostly in performances, where it’s easier for me to embrace non-binary gender.

I had a different period in Sweden, for three years when I had a boyfriend and we were living together. Then we separated. When we split up, I lost so many parts of my life, not just the relationship but also my home and a lot of friends. Before entering the relationship, I had more of an alternative community around me that was very unwelcomed by my partner. At the time of the breakup, I was already distanced from some of the people who could have helped me. That year, I just travelled so much. Because I didn’t have an apartment, I just booked as much travel for work abroad as I could. At the same time, this was the first occasion in Sweden that I had a proper budget for a project. So I was attached to the country in that way, in a functional relationship with funding bodies. But I was physically exhausted from moving between countries, more than from touring. Touring is not a restructuring of life, but moving is. Touring became home. Travelling was a constant. I love trains. I love planes. I can travel for ten hours. It makes me feel safe. Phones are off, and there is this set time frame that I can use to focus on one thing at a time. Being on stage was a way for me to “turn off” during that period. Stages are one structure; you know how to operate there. In the midst of administration, travelling, arriving and setting up, that one hour of performing was actually peaceful. I think it’s because dancing is the only thing I have in my life that actually comes from a very early age. I started dancing professionally when I was six. It made me feel like I had a history. That is in contrast to always being surrounded by producers or others whom I had only met in the last three days. Or even friends in Stockholm – or in places where I toured – friends who had known me for less than three years. These people had no idea who I used to be, who I was in my early twenties. Almost the only thing that had been long-term in my life was that everything was short-term. All the things that were part of my personal life before the migration period were kind of erased. It was traumatic. At a certain point, there was only administration of all my travels, caravan problems, boat problems, money problems. All my narratives were about that. And then I made a piece about it. It’s called Cyborg Sunday.

The fact that I can work in English is what allowed me to survive in Sweden until now. My Portuguese is more or less gone. Nowadays, I think in English. When I speak English with someone here, we meet on common ground, since it’s foreign for both of us. When I try to get around with Swedish, the situation is very unequal. The other is speaking their native tongue, and I am speaking a language that I started learning “yesterday”. Maybe it’s about pride for me. I want to be able to express complex thoughts. I mean, I read philosophy. I’m not in a rush to speak baby language.

Until very recently, my life was an emergency of getting money to live. Because of that, I only speak coffee Swedish. I hear people saying it’s a game-changer to speak Swedish, but I think that’s a lie. Although I love how Sweden allows me to produce work, I doubt that I will ever be viewed as a Swedish person. It’s a very white context, super segregated. This is contradictory, since Sweden has a long history of hosting exiled communities and cultures. But there is a discomfort with the other. “Foreigner” comes before anything. Sometimes it can be like a tender otherness, but you will never pass.

A while ago, I started to use “we” when speaking about things going on in Sweden. “Because we here in Sweden do this and that…” People would get confused. I also applied for Swedish citizenship last September, to be able to vote and to make that symbolic gesture of belonging here. They told me I need five years in Sweden – I’ve been here for six – but I am only allowed to have travelled eight weeks abroad per year, because that’s what they consider a standard vacation. All absence from the country above those eight weeks is deducted from the amount of time I have lived in Sweden. So I’m not even close.

Now that my life is a bit calmer – I have an apartment, I manage to live ok on what I earn and so on – suddenly all these questions of who I am came back. For a while I was depressed. I was wondering where “I” am in all this administration of life. But I concluded that there could be no separation between work and self. Throughout my twenties, this is what became peculiar with my identity. I don’t care about traditional family values. My life just has another structure. My friendships are on and off and intense. I see friends in Chile or Brazil once a year, once every two years. We are like family, but we don’t talk so much when I’m not there. I hate digital communication, texting, and e-mails. We use the time when we are together. I arrive and it’s like it was yesterday. We just hang out 24/7. With my friends in Sweden it’s the same, in a way. I get in touch when I’m back from travelling, and I schedule seeing them. One thing that I do differently now is that I actually try to plan my work travel in a way that allows more space for these relationships. For example, I’m going to Brazil to perform for three days, but then I’m actually staying an extra week to be there with my friend and join her in her daily life and check out the art scene. I also have certain rules for myself now. I try not to travel more than two weeks per month. I prefer staying some weeks in one place, making several shows or teaching or something. I also prefer to engage local people when I need dramaturge or a stage assistant, rather than bringing a team with me. This is both for economic, social and political reasons; these cannot be separated.

You asked me what would happen if I couldn’t fly anymore. I try to imagine touring being organised so that you go from city to city by train on a consecutive route instead of flying all over. It’s not like me to say this, but I think that is very close to impossible today. I am already pushing the production structures so much to be able to just work. It’s extremely difficult to negotiate. You negotiate for years and when a date comes you just need to take it. Often, these are dates for festivals or specific empty slots in a programme and you just take it or leave it. There is rarely space to discuss this month or the other. I’m pretty concerned with environmental questions, but sometimes I feel people misplace the responsibility on the individual dancer travelling for work. It’s still far more environmentally friendly that a performer travels to present their work to a whole audience than the audience travelling to see the performance in a different place. To change the travelling patterns of contemporary dance would be possible, but not something artists can do alone, and I am not sure venues are so concerned that they would be open to restructuring the way they programme to make a difference. It seems easy to turn to a dancer and say, “Why do you travel so much?” But it’s extremely difficult to work around it within the established structures of production and touring.

#dinismachado #english #workingontravel #trainsandboatsandplanes

0 notes

thesffcorner · 5 years

Text

Emergency Contact

Emergency Contact is a contemporary novel written by Mary H K Choi. It follows 2 characters: Penny, a freshman at UTC who wants to be a writer, and Sam, a boy who works and lives in a coffee shop nearby and wants to be a documentarian. The two meet by accident, but when Sam has a panic attack that he mistakes for a heart attack, Penny helps him, and they become each other's emergency contacts. Soon however, both realize their relationship might be deeper than that. This was an odd novel: it started off pretty engaging, but lost a lot of the steam towards the middle, and though the ending picked up pace, the actual climax left me somewhat dissatisfied. However, even though my reading experience wasn’t great, there were still elements of this book I enjoyed a lot. It seems the book is pretty polarizing, and I think there are two main reasons for it, so without further ado, let’s talk about them.

Writing: Writing is subjective, and as such I tend to avoid talking about it, unless it’s noteworthy. Well, here it’s definitely noteworthy. It’s what I like to call ‘quirky, modern prose’; think mumblecore in films, but in novel form. The characters are up to date with modern slang, jargon and internet culture, and as such they speak in a very exaggerated manner; when they text they use a lot of shortcuts, barely any punctuation, their thought process is very ‘raw’ and sometimes more than a little iffy with the jokes, and just in general it’s a style that I don’t think many people will like. It’s hard to explain without examples, so here are 2: “Okay, they weren’t full on frontal - bless. Mark was still sixteen, and Penny didn’t need the FBI landing at her college dorm for kiddie porn. They were risque though. Each went slightly beyond the treasure trail. [...] Penny was even sure he Facetuned at least one, which was a quality she simply could not respect in a man.” (pg. 14) “Oh my God, Penny. Stop being so emo. Are you going to make us talk about feelings?” asked Mallory “Seriously, you are so homeschooled sometimes” (pg 296) I dare you to show that to someone over the age of 40 and expect them understand any of it. There are several problems with this. First, I like a book that’s about teenagers, and sounds like what teenagers actually speak like. I’ve heard from people younger than me, who’ve read this book, and didn’t like it because of the way it’s written; they thought it didn’t sound authentic, and tried too hard. I personally didn’t find this to be an issue; I thought both Penny and Sam, as well as the rest of the characters for the most part spoke like people do today, but keep in mind I’m 24, and have been out of college for at least a couple of years. Second, and what actually bothered me, is that this style of writing was exhausting to read. On the one hand, seeing as we are trapped inside the heads of two incredibly anxious, over-thinkers, it made sense that their internal monologues were likewise overwritten and exhausting, but it made for a really unappealing reading experience. I shouldn’t feel like I’ve been run over by a tractor every time I read more than 2 paragraphs of a contemporary romance; a lot of the time it almost felt like Choi was writing on a dare to show someone how hip with the times she was. Which is fine, but I’d like to actually get to know Penny and Sam, without having to waddle through endless apathy and jargon. The third thing, which even I had some issues with, were the risque jokes. Look, I was a teen. I know how it was; you’d say whatever offensive thing comes to mind to get a reaction; it’s basically part of the universal adolescent experience. Except a) Penny is 18 and in college, and Sam is 21; and b) they are still risque jokes even if they are said ironically. It’s a catch 22; you want to subvert tropes and make fun of stereotypes, but you still have to write those tropes and stereotypes. So I completely understand why you’d be turned off by jokes about underage porn, calling men who cry ‘pussies’, calling people who are awkward ‘homeschooled’ or making racist and xenophobic jokes. It’s authentic, but it’s not fun to read. Characters: My last point about the writing, leads nicely into what I know a lot of people had issues with (and at points I did too) which were the characters. Let’s start with Penny. Penny is both very funny and infuriating to read from. At times she reminded me of myself when I was her age; constantly anxious, judgmental, with a superiority complex stemming from being the smartest and most read person in class, someone who doesn’t fit in and purposefully isolates herself even more to cope. To top it off, she has a strained relationship with her mother, an unpleasant experience with men, and generally prefers communication over text. There were so many things that she did and said that I just couldn’t stand, and a lot of them, were things I would’ve done and said when I was her age. As such, while I didn’t like Penny, I can’t say she isn’t a well written, well rounded, authentic character. This could lead into a bigger debate about protagonists, but in my opinion, the protagonist needs to be fully fleshed out and well written, more than they need to be likable, and this is especially true of female protagonists, since they are rarely allowed to be flawed. My issues with Penny were more that I didn’t feel like she changed by the end of the novel, and a lot of her flaws were never even addressed, let alone resolved, as well as some of her truly bad behavior. Like I said Penny is often judgmental, and the book implicitly sides with her, even though lots of times she’s blatantly wrong and draws conclusions based on stereotypes. A good example is the scene where she arrives at UTC, and a girl asks about her lipstick; I’m sorry, but when are we going to stop demonizing girls for enjoying make up? The girl is friendly and nice to her, and Penny still concludes she’s vapid and dumb because she asks about PENNY’S LIPSTICK. There’s a scene later on where she decides to meet Sam without the lipstick on, because I guess ‘that’s her authentic self’ and like fuck off. Wearing makeup doesn’t make you inauthentic or dumb, and you just KNOW, that if Penny were a boy, or a boy asked about her lipstick, y’all would be praising this book about how progressive it was. Then, there’s the whole subplot with Jude and Mallory. Mallory was equally as judgmental and annoying as Penny, so their rivalry was understandable, but Jude was nothing but nice and kind to Penny the whole book, and Penny repays her by hiding and lying to her about the one thing Jude asked her not to do. Jude calls her out on her behavior, and gets rightfully pissed, but then she still forgives both Penny and Sam so easily, even though they treat her like shit for the whole book. Moreover, I didn’t even get the sense that Penny was genuinely sorry to cause Jude pain, or felt bad for lying; she was just scared that Jude wouldn’t talk to her anymore, which was incredibly shitty and selfish, and the book never makes her face any real consequences for it. The same can be said about her relationship with her mother. All of her monologues, internal and otherwise, about how terrible her mother was just because she was hot, young, and flirts a lot were exhausting. I get that Penny was angry at her mother for trying to be her friend instead of parent, but you know what might help you solve that Penny? TALKING TO HER. This woman pays for your education, lets you choose exactly what you want to do, which is not something many people have the privilege of, clearly loves and cares about you, and has genuinely done nothing wrong, for you to hate her as much as you do. Especially, in comparison to Sam’s mother who is an actual monster. The fact that she drives to the hospital, and then doesn’t see her mother, constantly brushes off her calls and texts, doesn’t go to her ACTUAL BIRTHDAY was just ridiculously shitty behavior, and again, she never really gets called out on it, or suffers any consequences, even in the end when they have their big make up scene! The only thing I liked about that scene was Celeste calling out Penny’s behavior towards her peers; that she doesn’t have friends not because everyone hates her, but because she considers everyone beneath her because they don’t match up to her ridiculously high standards she holds everyone to. I wish someone told me that when I was her age, but man, was her character hard to read from. But honestly, Penny was a gem compared to Sam, who I wanted to punch multiple times. Beware, some SPOILERS about Sam inbound. First off, Sam is possibly the most unfortunate character I have ever read about in books; his backstory is so sad, so beyond dramatic, it was like he walked straight of the set for Days of Our Lives. He has an alcoholic and a hoarder mother, grew up perpetually poor, is constantly starving, is himself a borderline alcoholic and is still in love with a manipulative, abusive ex-girlfriend. There’s also false pregnancies, him failing out of community college to protect a Dreamer and panic attacks. That’s… waaay too much drama for one person. And to make matters worse, a lot of the issues Sam has, are self-inflicted, and it’s very hard to root for and sympathise with someone who consistently makes the wrong decision about everything. First off, Sam works in a coffee shop, and lives rent free in the attic of said coffee shop. The owner even pays him more than minimum wage, and lets him eat and drink coffee at the shop. And yet, Sam is constantly broke and starving, because he forgets to eat, doesn’t feel like it, has no money because he spent it on alcohol (even though he’s sober) or expensive dates with Lorraine. How am I supposed to root for him? He saves enough money to enroll in a documentary film-making class at a community college, and instead of using this as an opportunity to truly make a good documentary, get it to play at student festivals, and local film fests and connect with other artists in the area (since y’know, they live in AUSTIN), he shoots at the last minute, doesn’t get realizes until the ABSOLUTE last minute, and realizes that his subject and his mother are unregistered Dreamers. Are you telling me, that someone who was a FILM MAJOR doesn’t understand how releases work, and didn’t bother to check what the university’s policy on authorial rights are before he enrolled in the class? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? So he fails the class because he refuses to submit the film. He doesn’t DO anything with the film; we don’t find out if he intends to submit it to festivals, screen it, or anything of the sort he just fails the class because he’s either the stupidest director ever or the most noble guy in Austin. Then there’s Lorraine. Oh boy. Firstly, Sam’s absolute obsession with Lorraine was infuriating. I don’t find it fun or engaging to read about someone who is so naive and thoroughly manipulated, and I am forced to watch them endure an abusive, self-destructive relationship for chapters on end. Sam doesn’t love Lorraine; he’s obsessed with her. It’s not ‘love’ to know absolutely everything about the other person, and expect them to do the same; it’s not love to be completely codependent on the other person. As much as Lorraine was a bad person, so was Sam because he refused to see how destructive his behavior and their relationship was to him. Then, there’s the pregnancy. Why was it in the book? It’s fake, so there are no real consequences. Abortion is immediately dismissed as an adoption, even though objectively neither of the two are capable of being parents, with Lorraine refusing to go to an OBGYN, drinking though she might be pregnant and generally acting like the spoiled brat she is, and Sam having 17 dollars to his name, no real job, no prospects and no sense of responsibility. Sam could’ve easily realized his relationship to Lorraine was toxic without involving a potential child, and honestly his belief that a) Lorraine would somehow change or want him back, or won’t cheat on him just because of the baby and b) that her ridiculously rich and prejudiced family would allow him anywhere near that baby were borderline delusional. But the thing that pissed me off the most about Sam, was that he doesn’t get any resolution! We never find out what he does about his alcoholic mother, or the massive debt she had incurred in his name, there’s no comment on the fact that because of that he’d never be able to get a credit card, lease an apartment or buy a car; since he fails his course we never find out what he wants to do next or if he still wants to be a filmmaker, we never find out what happens with the documentary. All we get is that he’s now dating Penny. Yay. Some Good Things: I did gives this book 3 starts, so here are some good things. I liked Penny’s writing class and her professor, as well as what we see from their class discussions about who gets to write whose story. I also enjoyed Penny’s Anima story and the Korean couple; I thought the connection between the virtual baby and her phone being a metonymy for Sam was great. Andy was also cool, and I liked the banter he has with Penny; he was smart and funny, and I appreciated that we actually got some female-male friendships in this book. Jude and Mallory were also great; I especially liked Mallory’s speech about cows and mothers, and that she was presented as a confident if a bit overbearing person. Bastian was also cool, as were his mother and buddies. I enjoyed the fact that he was this boy trying to prove he was a man, but he was also a talented artist. I honestly wish the book had more to do with him and Sam, than Sam’s actual main plot. Speaking of Sam, I did like that he cried, was vulnerable and had hobbies that aren’t stereotypically male, while also being very much a man. He has tattoos and they are shown to be cool instead of ‘edgy’; I think the last time I saw that was probably Divergent. Yikes. Conclusion: Again, I find myself only half-recommending a book. There are good things in here; it’s just that the reading experience wasn’t great, and some of the character drama went a bit too far for it to be believable. If you think you’d have issue with any of the things I mentioned then skip this book; but if you don’t mind any of it, then you very well might love this. It’s a polarizing novel for a reason.

goodreads

#emergency contact #emergency contact review #book review #moni talks

0 notes

wanderingsofal · 7 years

Note

#midnightrandomness I'm all for Argen unknowingly using his looks to manipulate people because he doesn't know how to human very well and "why is that girl staring at me like that Larin... Larin?" "Huh? Sorry, I was distracted... you were saying?"

I really really like this idea, so I ran with it. Thank you!

Lawrence’s Guide to Being Human - 1. Sometimes people will want to sleep with you. In a bed. Without actually sleeping.

The thing,Lawrence thought, about Argen’s humanform? Was that he had absolutely no clue how good he looked. Lawrence couldwatch him for ages and never get tired of it. Those bright silver eyes were hisfavorite. He loved watching them light up when Argen was happy. And the way hishair matched the color of his eyes, framing his face and contrasting so wellwith his skin… he was a figure of living moonlight. Lawrence wasn’t the onlyone that thought so either, if the way the baker was currently looking at thedragon was any indication. Her eyes had glazed over, and Lawrence was certainshe was staring at Argen’s prominent cheekbones and strong jaw with somethinglike lust.

“That looks so good!” Argen pointed to a loaf of bread onthe counter. “What kind of bread is it?” Aaron and Lawrence had just gotten himto try bread when in his human form, and to Argen’s surprise he’d enjoyed it alot more than when he’d tried it as a dragon. Which was probably why he haddragged them into the first bakery they saw when they arrived in a town thenext day.

The shopkeeperblushed prettily and smiled up at the dragon. That was another thing Lawrenceloved about Argen. He was tall, a full head taller than Lawrence himself, andthe perfect hight to lean against beside the fire and fall asleep.

“Oh, that’s. Um. That’s flax seed bread. It’s very, uh, verygood. Would you, um…. Would you like to try some?” The girl took the loaf fromthe display and brought out a knife before Argen could even answer.

“I- thanks,” Argen smiled and Lawrence thought the girl wasgoing to faint.

“For gods sakes!” Aaron groaned. “Doesn’t that damn kid knowany better? If he doesn’t buy that bread, she might have to repay the baker forit out of her own wages.” He pushed past Lawrence to grab Argen by the arm. “Comeon, Argen. Leave the poor girl alone.”

“Oh, but,” Argen glanced back at the girl, who was lookingdecidedly disappointed at Aaron’s interruption. “I was going to try some-”

“Here.” Lawrence hated to see Argen looking disappointedabout anything. He pulled out his bag of coins and carefully counted out enoughfor the loaf. “Pay the lass for the bread and we’ll take it with us. We stillneed to get to the apothecary and the tailor before they close for the day.”

Argen grinned andtook the coins. “Thanks, Larin,” he said in a lowvoice that never failed to send shivers up Lawrence’s spine. Not that he’dplanned it that way. Lawrence was almost 99% certain his dragon had no idea theeffect he had on people. His fingers tingled where Argen’s had brushed them,and he wanted nothing more than to make Argen smile like that more often. Damn,but he was far gone.

“You’re so lost,” Aaron muttered. “Tell him already, why don’tyou?”

“Because he hasn’t got a clue what love is. He’s just so…innocent. I wouldn’t want to hurt him.”

Aaron rolled hiseyes and shook his head. Lawrence thought he caught the word ‘idiot’ from under his breath, but before anything morecould be said, Lawrence returned, clutching a well-wrapped loaf of bread andwhat looked like several rolls.

“Oh my gods. You. Just…” Aaron sighed and left the store.

“Did I do something wrong?” Argen wanted to know. Lawrencelaughed.

“No, he’s just mad you’re the best haggler of us all, andyou don’t even know how you do it.”

A silver eyebrowrose in confusion as they followed Aaron. “Whatdo you mean?”

“Look.” Lawrence turned and nodded back to the bakery, wherethe shopkeeper was watching them leave.

“She’s watching us,” Argen said, forehead wrinkling a littleas he tried to understand. “Larin, why is she watching us? She’s got customers.”

“She’s watching you, you dolt,” Aaron told him, stompingback over to them. “Just you. Not us.”

“…Why?” the dragon wanted to know. “Does this have anythingto do with why she told me her address and what time her father goes to bed atnight?”

Lawrence stoppeddead. “She what?” He blinked, processingthe information. “She told you…” and then it hit, and he doubled over laughing.Aaron sighed.

“She wants you to come to her house tonight.”

“But… why? Does she have more bread there? I… Larin? Why areyou laughing? A- Aaron? What’s funny?”

Aaron had startedto chuckle, and then to laugh, until he and Lawrence were standing there in themiddle of the street, laughing so hard tears were leaking from their eyes.Lawrence was sure they made quite a sight, what with the beautiful and confusedArgen standing between them. The thought set him off again.

Eventually, hecalmed down enough to talk, though not without bursting into little fits ofgiggles again. “Argen, she wants to sleep with you.”

“…Why?” If anything, Argen looked more confused than ever. “Isleep with you two. Does she want to join us? We’d need an extra bedroll but…”

“That’s not what he means!” Aaron cried, still shaking withlaughter.

“Argen, do you know what humans do when they want to, uh,pair-bond?” Lawrence asked. They’d talked about dragon bonding before, but herealized they hadn’t spoken about human marriage or sex.

Argen’s eyes went wide. “You sleep together? Did you… did youboth want to pair-bond with me?” He didn’t look upset at the prospect, whichwas… a thought for another time. Lawrence shook his head.

“No, that’s just sleeping. But humans do… other things inbed. They, uh…” he looked to Aaron for help. He’d never been good at explainingthis sort of thing. For some reason, Argen was looking distinctly disappointed.

“She wants you in her bed, but not to sleep,” Aaron toldhim. Because humans, we mate in bed. To, uh, make little humans.”

“Oh!” Argen blushed. The red tinted his whole skin, and hecovered his face with his hands. “Oh. So she… with me… oh. Do… should I go backand tell her I’m not- I don’t…. I’m not interested?”

“No, buddy,” Aaron wrapped a comforting arm around Argen. “Justdon’t show up. She’ll be disappointed, but she’ll get over it. And I knowsomebody,” he shot a pointed glance at Lawrence, “who would be more thandisappointed if you didn’t come back to camp with us tonight.”

Argen lifted hishead from his hands and glanced between the two of them. “I- alright. Do I need to return the bread then? She wouldn’thave given it to me if she didn’t think I would, um…”

“No. It’s our bread. We’re keeping it. In fact,” Aaron’sgrin turned sly. “I think you should do the all the haggling from now on. We’llconsider it a lesson in… how to be human.” Then he shook his head. “But I guessthat wouldn’t be fair to the poor shopkeepers. I’ll go next. I don’t trusteither of you with getting the right herbs from the apothecary. And I don’tknow about you, but I like my tea to taste like tea and my healing poultices toactually work. Come on.” He walked away again.

Lawrence smiledand let his hand rest on Argen’s shoulder.“It’s fine,” he said quietly. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I didn’t?” the hope in Argen’s voice was almost childlike.It was hard to remember sometimes that this was a being who was several hundredyears old and considered a (mostly) competent adult among his kind.

“No, you didn’t. But if you ever get confused aboutsomething, ask us first, okay? There’s a lot about being human that you don’tknow yet. And there are things about going to bed with someone that you wouldneed to know.”

Argen shook hishead. “But I don’t want to go to bed with anyone. Not… not like that.” Then he frowned, and glanced at Lawrence. “Well,maybe one person.”

The prince gentlyruffled his hair. “Well, when you’re ready, you canalways ask me or Aaron what to do.”

“I’ll remember that.”

Lawrence hoped that he would. And another part of himhoped that one day, he would be the one to teach Argen more of human matingcustoms.

#my writing #argentum the dragon #Lawrence the prince #Aaron the prince #being human is hard

83 notes · View notes