I was raised on Disney animated classics. Beauty and the Beast is about as old as I am oh geez that's a little haunting and was definitely highly ranked on my preferred viewing list. My parents have fondly recalled me requesting a nightlight of "Beast-growl," who was the best character in my tiny child heart. That wasn't The Favorite of mine, though. Apparently I watched Dumbo so many times it's a surprise I don't have it permanently etched into the backs of my eyelids. But I digress...
There's something wholesome about the Disney animated retellings of classic fairy tales. I mean, that only makes sense. It's clear from the Disney branding that the end goal is family friendly fun. Family friendly fun wasn't much of the original focus for these stories, though.
It was a rude awakening for me, going into The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales. Perhaps a little less jarring than it could have been - I read those stories fairly early on in my childhood. Had I waited until I was older, the experience might have straight up concerned me. In fact, it was super grim(m). Cinderella's step sisters cut off parts of their feet to fit into the glass slipper, trying to con their way to princesshood. Sleeping Beauty has a whole second part where an Ogre Queen wants to eat the children of the awoken princess and her prince. Snow White has to thwart the evil queen three separate times, and in some editions, the queen dies dancing in red hot shoes at Snow White's wedding. Disney's Tangled was in theaters only six years ago, so hardly in my childhood, but the Grimm Brothers' version was a far throw from the chipper animated movie with chameleon and horse sidekicks and a frying pan-wielding princess. Rapunzel's parents gave her over to their neighbor witch as a new born because Rapunzel's mom craved the witch's lettuce (rapunzel) so badly, she promised her first born child for it. Oh and later the prince falls out of the tower Rapunzel's kept in and blinds himself on thorns. Oh and Rapunzel became a single mom raising hers and the prince's children on her own. Oh but he shows up years later and her tears on his eyes cures his blindness so it's practically a happy ending!
... practically...
Not all Disney fairy tales are soft-edged Grimm Brothers adaptations, though. There's many more from different cultures around the world (though it would seem that Germany sure knew how to craft a mean folk tale) but I'm gonna turn the scrutiny on Hans Christian Anderson and his little ditty known as The Little Mermaid. This is the one that gets me the most, because Hans Christian Anderson doesn't really have the same reputation as the Brothers Grimm. Which almost makes it worse, in my opinion. The Brothers Grimm just published the fairy tales they dug up, even softening some things up for their audience like how they changed it to Snow White's evil jealous step-mother rather than her evil jealous birth mother. It seemed kinder to have an evil force come in from outside the family to want to kill Snow White. But oooohhh Hans, no, Hans Christian Anderson wrote all of the stories he's got to his name.
So why's The Little Mermaid being especially singled out here? Well, in the original story, the little mermaid (or TLM to her friends) doesn't even have a soul. She's mostly fish. She doesn't get human emotions. She thinks the human prince is cute and wants his hot prince body but she doesn't truly get what love is, exactly. The sea witch is a pretty neutral player here, just telling TLM all the side effects of becoming human and the sacrifices she'd be making. TLM becomes human, and whoops, actually falls in love with the prince, but he doesn't love her (oh no). So TLM's sisters come to her with a knife to kill the prince that will allow her to return to the sea. But she loves him now, so she can't go killing him, and instead, she dies. What the heck.
Now, this is a pretty Christianity-based story. TLM can't go to heaven and have that concept of eternal life after death because she has no soul because she was a fish person. But! Good News! She ascends to join the daughters of the air, who can earn souls with 300 years of good deeds. But! Bad News! This is heavily reliant on children being good and bad. When a child is good, a year is taken off the 300. When a child is bad, the daughters of the air cry and a day is added to the 300 for every tear they shed. Which is a pretty messed up moral blackmail to slap onto the end of an already pretty messed up story about nobody being really happy except the prince, who gets to marry another lady and live none the wiser to the deeper story going on around him.
And this is the stuff that children still watch today! People looked at the original works and thought, somehow, they could shave off all the nasty bits except the main conflict, and show this to small children. Except it was all originally written or told mainly FOR children!
From all of this, I draw mainly two conclusions. 1) Children can handle a lot more darkness than they're given credit for. 2) Hans Christian Anderson was one messed up dude and probably would have had the Brothers Grimm going back to his works to liven them up a bit.
In light of my previous post regarding my visit to Cherry Springs and stargazing, I'm gonna go into the details of one of the favorite aspects of space: It's Big. Keep it at that and we might have a strong contender for Understatement of the Year. Sure, that only scratches the surface. The things we know about space can be compared to the things we know about the deep ocean - very little. A lot of general statements, a lot of loose estimations. Distances and names are the building blocks. Data on the materials composing other planets in our solar system alone are still being discovered.
Hmm... Okay, let's start close and work our way out.
Observe, if you will, with your mind's eye, our immediate planetary space, atmosphere, and gravitational pull. Our planet has one natural satellite and 2,271 manmade ones. This specific definition of satellite here excludes any chunks of burnt up meteor or debris from space missions. So that's currently one moon, 2,271 human contraptions zipping across our sky. The International Space Station, for example, orbits the earth about every 90 minutes, giving it approximately sixteen orbits in one 24-hr period and you can call it a day hahaha.
Zoom out a bit, and we have the Inner Planets. There's the asteroid belt that divides the inner and outer planets of our Solar System. In a tight huddle around Sol, our only star in our system, we have Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, going outward. Of the Inner Planets, Earth is the biggest (radius of 3,959 miles), Venus is the hottest (462 degrees Celsius), Mercury is the smallest (radius of 1,516 miles), and Mars is the reddest (got some rusty dust there buddy). Back out further, and we have eight planets, since we add Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune to the mix. But where's Pluto?, the ancient voices cry in dismay. Don't worry, I think Pluto got an upgrade rather than a downgrade. Sure, it's not a planet, but it is one of many Dwarf Planets. Actually, Pluto is the biggest Dwarf Planet (radius of 737.6 miles)! And it lords over its own subcategory in a subcategory in a subcategory in a subcategory of heavenly bodies!
Uh... Let's break that down. Pluto is a plutoid (an ice dwarf planet) which are unique Trans-Neptunian Objects (dwarf planets that orbit past Neptune) that are a subset of Minor Planets (asteroids, centaurs, trojans - the very small of the large things) which all fall under the umbrella term of Dwarf Planets (anything too small to be a planet but too big to ignore should it come careening towards the earth bent on total destruction okay I'm kidding but only a little).
Think Pluto still got the raw end of the deal? Maybe Pluto should leave Sol's orbit for another sun, then? Well, the nearest neighboring star, Alpha Centauri A, is 4.367 lightyears away. For some perspctive, Sol is 93 million miles from Earth. Alpha Centauri A is part of a star binary with its pal, Alpha Centauri B, and an honorary mention to the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri that is not close enough to be involved in the binary tango to become a tertiary, but appears to be gravitationally bound to the other two. That's three stars for the price of ditching our one yellow star! Quite the bargain, Pluto. It's a shame Dwarf Planets don't really take vacations.
Now we jump out yet again... Ah, that was quite the jump. There's the Milky Way Galaxy. It's about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers across, or 100,000 lightyears if that helps. That's our galaxy. We can see it slash across the night sky in a cloudy streak of light, if there's not too much visual noise getting in the way. So many stars, so many planets, and we're just on one of the outside spiraling arms of it - the Orion arm, to be exact. That's not even one of the big-time arms either. It's secondary and between two other larger arms. So, whenever someone asks if we're at the center of the universe, well, haha, we're not even at the center of our own galaxy, one of approximately one hundred BILLION galaxies. Probably. There's most likely more. We just don't know.
Our closest neighboring galaxy is Andromeda, a mere stone's throw away at 2.5 million lightyears. A reasonable day trip, if the day is 2.5 million years long and we can travel at the speed of light. At the speed we can travel in space right now, we'll get there in about 785,200,000,000,000 years, so just in time for lunch!
It's a big accomplishment for us as a species to know as much as we do now about the moon, our own natural satellite. And yet, there's so much more space to go. I backed out to the next closest galaxy, but that in reality is only barely scratching the surface. Our tiny minds simply cannot fathom the true capacity and sheer vastness of space. It is too gosh dang big. Makes me think of the original definition of 'awesome' - to be struck by awe. Filled with wonder... and with terror. We have so much to learn. I'm glad I got to glimpse some of it.
I'm going camping this weekend. The place I'm going is Cherry Springs, a state park that has some of the clearest, least light-polluted sky on the eastern seaboard. That's right, friends - I'm going stargazing!
I have been to Cherry Springs twice before, and it's incredible. During prime camping seasons, there are telescopes brought out for the campers to use and a showing of the night sky. Large open fields work as natural observatories edged with trees that capture fog in the earliest hours of the morning. Arching high above, stretching from opposing edges of the horizon, you can see the Milky Way Galaxy with the naked eye...
Astronomy has long been a hobby of mine. I took an astronomy class in high school, where we had a planetarium and studied stars and planetary bodies. In college, I was able to go to observatories where we opened up the domed ceilings in the middle of winter to take long exposure photos of stars. For an extra credit project, I chose a constellation to replicate, making each point in Ursa Major a to-scale distance from the earth's surface. I had an early appreciation for astrology, but quickly realized that there was so much more to space and stars than arbitrarily fabricated personality types based on the constellational location of the sun and moon at birth. They're fun concepts to play around with, but burning balls of gas lightyears away won't tell me what to do!
I'm a little bummed this weekend won't grant full exposure for the area. The reflected sunlight in the form of the moon at waning crescent will still be enough to reduce the viewing of fainter or more distant stars. A new moon would be ideal, but I'll take what I can get - there will be hours prior and post moonrise that can be maximized on.
At some point, I'll be doing a more involved space-related blog. Hmm, probably make that blogs, to be safe. For now, I'm just excited! Even a glimpse of the spiraling vastness of space, with such a limited view from our tiny point in the cosmos, is worth every second.
DISCLAIMER: I've never been under the delusion that this blog is impartial or unbiased in any way. I've always been one to proudly form my own opinions. I work to keep an open mind, realizing my own limitations in areas of study and life experience. I'm limited by my time on this earth, and the fact that I am only one person. It would be incredibly crass of me to insinuate that I could ever speak for everyone. If you ever think I do present that way, I assure you the words I speak are backed with observations of many other people. Oh, and the unspoken certainty that I can always be wrong in any generalization ever made. Which is more or less spoken now.
So. Uh. Here comes an opinion. I did my research to form it. Please do so as well to form your own.
We'll start this off with a statement that I believe global climate change is real. Perhaps 'believe' is the wrong word - though it seems as if irrefutable facts can be dismissed at the convenience of other people's wishes when it comes to science. I'm looking at you, people who think the earth is flat. Humanity as a collective has not been the kindest to our planet, and that's putting it politely. It's a disheartening issue to face, too. While one individual isn't going to make all the difference in aiding ozone regeneration or preventing oil spills, a growing number of individuals will.
The biggest hurdle is that standard human activities aren't the true devastators. Large companies that profit from reckless fracking and burning coal will push the use of these resources, and make them cheaper, more accessible. The concept of sustainable, renewable energy will be ridiculed and mocked for as long as it's not immediately helping the competitors.
Reducing use of fossil fuels and reliance on green energy is still hotly contested for some reason. The arguments against are baffling to me. So even if the world is perfectly fine, and the long-term consequences are not nearly as severe as the research shows, what is bad about using renewable energy? Oh no, the globe is healthier anyway? The air is cleaner, the cost of energy is reduced? Gosh, you're right, that would be awful, I'd hate to see quality of life improve around the world for nothing. That's sarcasm, dearest.
Ah, but the renewable resources, they don't supply reliable energy, right? It was the problem Germany faced, when having a day of 90% green energy in May of this year. Because the problem of energy regularity hasn't been solved, the overproduction of dirty (coal-burning) energy to compensate greatly increased the country's carbon emissions. It becomes a problem of storing and maintaining steady energy sources, rather than fluctuating.
It's not an easy problem to fix. If it were, it'd be done already. But I believe (and it's the correct use of the word this time) that it is possible. And I know it's worth it. Sure we can just figure out the complexities of terraforming other planets and simplifying space travel, but I think our own planet is worth treating well before we all just... hypothetically abandon ship.
Today in another segment of 'all that comprises society is made up and everything you know is only what you make of it,' I want you to pick a book. Any book. Is it Pride & Prejudice? Is it Clifford the Big Red Dog? Doesn't matter what you picked, because it's a classic now. Well, only if you think it is, really.
The concept of classic media, popularly The Classics, goes as far back as ancient plays and stories from cultures lost to the passing of time. This is art that survived on word of mouth, changed and translated with each new telling until the written word was sustainable. Makes you wonder what plays weren't good enough to keep remembering. There are novels regaled as literature for their beautiful prose and accolades. They're commonly read in school, because you've gotta read the classics! Freshly printed books that have found success can be seen with critics' reviews on the backs or in the dust covers, raving about how they're modern classics.
This is a label with various criteria. For a story to be hailed a classic, it can be really old. Or it can be placed on a list of great written works. Or a community of people from around the world can come together and agree that a certain piece should be regarded as a classic, on par with those that are more regularly known that way. Or... Or it can be one person, sitting down with their favorite story that made a deep personal impact on them. They can hold the book in their hands, thinking on what the story did for them. That story has resonated with an aspect of their life. To them, it's a classic. One for the ages.
Despite how arbitrary such a label is, I don't think it lessens the impact of it. In fact, when someone might refer to a story not widely known to be classic, as one, it gives the concept more weight. Like I said, everything we know is only what we make of it. A story connected with its reader. That doesn't inherently make it a classic, but them viewing it as a classic does. Value is put on the story. That's the most any writer could hope for.
If you haven't watched From One Second To The Next, a short documentary by Werner Herzog, it's an incredibly heart-wrenching half-hour. It's right on Netflix, I highly recommend giving it a viewing. In case the title of the blogpost didn't give it away, it's about the hazards and devastating results to texting and driving.
It's an easy enough warning to dismiss. Anyone with a cell phone is familiar with the pull of just checking something quickly, or responding to a text, or getting bored while waiting for traffic. Some are better than others at building the discipline to ignore it, or pull over to address the phone. I remember when I was really good at this. It was back when I had my first smartphone. I wasn't completely won over by texting at the time - it was still pretty new to me. If people wanted to get in touch with me, they called. If I wanted to answer, I pulled over, or I waited until I was at my destination before I returned the call.
Now when I'm on long drives by myself, I'll queue up the phone call on the side of the road and then start talking. When I'm at stoplights, the urge to fill the lull by just checking for notifications is tough to brush off. I found myself making some excuses about how I'm not nearly as bad as I could be, that there are people way worse. And there are, to be sure. I'll be driving and see people, from a wide spread of age groups, either on a phone call or texting while driving. I'm better than that, I'd think. I use headphones when doing phone calls. I keep my hands free and my eyes on the road. And while that's all well and good, that doesn't mean I'm avoiding distractions every way I can when driving. That doesn't excuse the occasional glance at my phone, just to see what that alert is for, or who that text was from. I'm not even responding, but that's attention removed from the task at hand. The 'navigating my metal death machine down the road through a stream of other metal death machines at high speeds' task, which definitely gets downplayed the longer one is a driver.
But, as much as mass media would like to have you believe that smartphones are the bane of modern existence, they are not the only threat to driving safety. Everyone knows not to drink and drive, and yet people still do that. In fact, driving under the influence of any sort of uncontrolled substance is more common practice than anyone wants to believe.
If everyone knows this, why am I writing about it? Because recently I saw a person driving while reading a newspaper. I wish I could say this was the first time I'd seen someone throwing a giant sheet of paper up against their steering wheel while rolling down the road. Apparently books are another option. Tablets too. One person was so emphatic in their button mashing on whatever game they were playing on their Nintendo DS that they accidentally honked their horn and startled themselves into dropping the video game while in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Sure, smartphones are fantastic little devices. They are useful tools that give access to so much in daily life. And they are leaders in distraction. Sometimes it's just rude - taking texts or pictures at inappropriate times. When driving, it's deadly. But humanity has found ways to enable distractions that cannot be blamed on the new age of technology, too. In thinking about this, I've worked to re-evaluate my own driving safety habits. Take a moment to consider what your distractions are, and figure out safe ways to address them.
Please, be careful out there.
Composition of human languages is pretty tricky. There are the words that sound the same but mean different things. There are the words that have the same meanings but for different contexts. There are bursts of sound that are given meaning despite not having a distinctly spelled counterpart in the dictionary. You can trace the influence of one language on another by the incorporation of certain words or phrasing. The symbols used to write it all down can have ridged sounds or they can change based on the surrounding symbols. Some symbols present whole ideas by themselves, and some make no sense when standing alone.
Across history, the evolution of languages around the globe - regardless of where they are or how isolated their communities were - tend to follow a set trend. The spoken language is constantly growing, with the written counterpart staying loose and fairly unique depending on the writer. Then, when education becomes more widely spread and standardized, the written word does too. A language spread across large distances facilitates the growth of dialects. Advancements in technology enables the bridging of languages, the filling of lexical gaps.
This context is the backdrop to my wonderings about the origin of riddles. They've existed in media for as far back as entertainment goes, it would seem. You can do a base level of 'old' with the Ancient Greek sphinxes famous for doling out riddles. That's very old. It goes even further back with Ancient Egypt, which is incredibly old. [Quick history lesson for reference - Ancient Greece's eras span from about 1200 B.C. to 500 A.D., while Ancient Egypt's eras span from about 3100 B.C. to 332 B.C. The Pyramids of Giza were constructed in the Old Kingdom era of Ancient Egypt, and predate any Grecian poleis (city-states) by at least 1,500 years.] But we can go further back still! The earliest forms of written characters in China that influenced the modern characters used today in both Chinese and Japanese, were dated back to 7000 B.C. That's about 9,000 years ago! And they used riddles to pose puzzles, tell stories, all sorts of things!
Jumping into this journey to find where riddles started has brought me to a fascinating place, mentally. The Euro-centric history that has been so heavily leaned on in elementary U.S. education, trains the mind to cut off two-thirds of the world. It really only concerns itself with South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia when looking to the interactions with Europe and North America. It also adjusts the cultural context for things like language and riddles. Never before had I considered riddles to be math-based though that may be my own personal bias but many riddles found in India, Japan, and China posed mathematical conundrums. The definition of a riddle being based in wordplay is to limit the possibilities and uses of riddles.
My expectation going in would be to find a correlation between the development of standardized written language through education and the increase of riddles in that culture. I was wrong. I was assuming that riddles required a base level of writing to be produced, to allow for double-meaning and wordplay, but all they seem to have needed was a base level of observation. Riddles have long been used as a preservation of culture and thought, to keep the wit and wisdom of the people who brought them about. The general answer to my question of 'where do riddles come from?' seems to be 'everywhere,' with the bonus that they apparently have been around ever since at least two people figured out how to communicate with each other. That's incredible.
I have a fundamental appreciation for bees. I'm fortunate to not be allergic to bee stings. I read enough in early childhood to quash any possible fears that might have developed. I actually find bees pretty darn cute. At the very least I understand they are incredibly important. Not everyone shares this view. Let's see what I can do to change that.
In conversations with friends and family, the concept of the circle of life comes up often enough. It's a nice little reassurance that even if an animal seems completely useless or irredeemable in humanity's eyes, they can be worked into a necessary cycle that facilitates a standard quality of life for another creature. Maybe even a creature that humanity needs! Or a creature that impacts another creature. Or a creature that impacts another creature that impacts etc. You get the idea.
The topic usually rolls around when the dark of night is being enjoyed outside and the mosquitos are biting. This is usually brought up with the context of how mosquitos don't fit into that cycle. That's right! The sheer number of mosquitos are beyond excessive. Especially when their dwindling number of predators are taken into consideration, and not being their predators' only food source, it makes mosquitos seem kind of... irrelevant. They carry diseases. They leave irritating bumps. They're loosely bug vampires, and vampires aren't real, so why do mosquitos need to be? Not the best final argument but it seems to cap off my feelings nicely.
Mosquitos actually have been under attack from scientists that have genetically bred and released 'sexy' male mosquitos that, when reproducing with female mosquitos, result in a genetic dead end for that mosquito line. This is good! We need less of them! We can survive without them! Contrary to Disney's Lilo and Stitch, the mosquito is not an animal in need of protecting. No, my friend, what you're thinking of are bees.
Yes, bees! See, I brought it back around. Bees are about as crucial to the circle of life, the animal food chain, as is possible to be. They're the pollinators. They bring about fruit and vegetable production. Most plant matter humans consume has been brought about by bees. Most animals humans eat have subsisted off of plant matter that flourished under bees' influence. Also they make honey. We eat that too.
They're fuzzy forces of good in the universe. And they don't want to fight you, unless you start wrecking their hives. But you'd be mad if someone smashed up your house, so I'd say you brought that on yourself. That's called swift justice.
And YET. Many pesticides produced and tossed over plants to protect them for our consumption don't take bees into consideration. Or at least not as much as they should. Whole colonies are being obliterated en masse. The number of bees is shrinking at an alarming rate. Note that we NEED these specific bugs to have harmless access to these plants.
It's not often enough that I hear someone speak in favor of bees. You'd think something that can impact the longevity of the human race would have more of a buzz. So I'm writing about it. I'm still doing more research on it. Someday I hope to house and tend to my own hive. But for now, all I can do is be informed, support local beekeepers, and encourage others to do the same.
Sometimes I think about a concept I'll call 'the elusive story.' You know when you read a book that has this mystique surrounding the background of certain characters, or the world they are in? There are hints about how things are as they are, a glimpse into the lives of the individuals in question. But there's never anything concrete. It's all left up to the reader.
In writing, I've begun to think about the feel of a story, what it elicits in the minds of the readers. The most poignant moment I had was realizing exactly how strongly I could embrace a feeling beyond happiness or sadness. The world of the book, in a flash, was so real in my mind. It was a sense of nostalgia for something I was experiencing for the first time. What a fantastic skill, to give that overwhelming sense to someone through written story! I admire it, both as a reader and as a writer. This is far from diminishing the strength of character and skill with the written word that it takes to bring forth the standard range of human emotion for something or someone, either fictional or non-fictional. But it opened my mind to the possibilities.
So rarely do I get to experience these feelings in storytelling. So rarely, in fact, that it got me thinking about the frequency with which such feelings come about in general - then extrapolating that out to what it takes to carry over that experience in written form for someone else to consume and feel so utterly. It settles into your gut and tingles at the forefront of your brain. It's visceral. It's astounding.
It's the scene that drapes over your head like a sprawling realm of stars that dazzle with their surprisingly intense glow. It's the beating heat of the sun on a rolling desert landscape tossed in cutting winds. It's a gentle clearing with soft green light filtering through a lush canopy, their air buzzing and warm. It's a roaring storm that crackles in the atmosphere, with great forks of plasma slicing through the roiling indigo night.
It grips you.
The elusive story takes only the smallest, carefully placed details to fill out the world in your mind. Somehow, it's not too flowery or verbose, and yet it brings you there, wherever the story is going. It takes a fantastic amount of skill and experience to handle stories like threads in a tapestry that rests on the shoulders of the readers as a comfort. And every author that manages it does it a little differently. It's what encourages me to write the most. It's what I aspire to.
