You like me because I'm a scoundrel

So the first thing that comes to mind is Boromir. I remember reading a quote from LOTR, which I don’t have right now, so if someone knows what I’m talking about and would like to add it, please do, but basically it talks about how Boromir never cared much for romance or finding a partner, and he was dedicated to Gondor.

The second thing I’d like to point out is the dwarves. Here is a quote from Appendix A:

“The number of dwarf-men that marry is actually less than one-third. For not all the women take husbands: some desire none; some desire one that they cannot get, and so will have no other. As for the men, very many also do not desire marriage, being engrossed in their crafts.”

So basically this passage is confirming that about 2/3 of the entire dwarf population is aro/ace, which personally I find really very cool!

I would also like to note at this point another aspect of the dwarves just in general being very canonically queer, which is that they don’t really have any sense of gender roles, so while they presumably have biological gender, it’s not something that really influences their culture. But that’s a whole other thing.

On top of Boromir/the dwarves, the majority of Tolkien’s characters live out their lives as bachelors. Neither Bilbo or Frodo ever married, and Tolkien confirmed in the appendices that neither did Thorin. Legolas and Gimli of course live out their lives together, and you can interpret that how you will. Now this is great for homoerotic subtext, and personally I love headcanoning many of his characters as gay/bi, but it also just shows that in Middle Earth, romance in general isn’t necessary to live a happy life.

I would happily make the argument that the elves are on the ace spectrum. Despite all our jokes about The Nature of Middle Earth being a sex book, it’s honestly a lot about when they don’t have sex. Ignoring the first few generations who were super horny.

Sex is a ‘delight’ but they do it just to have children and then eventually the desire for intercourse fades. They also marry for love and companionship, not sexual desire.

Don’t forget they don’t have sex outside marriage. Because, again, sex is just a thing you do to have kids. And that’s how I, as an ace person, feel about sex. It’s just a thing, I have no strong feelings either way.

I get that a lot of the sex stuff is in line with Catholicism, but it also sounds like “a Catholic trying to make asexuality godly, decades before asexuality was a concept.”

LOTR is, to me, the ultimate asexual fantasy. So much of the love in those books is defined by the love between friends, platonic bonds of affection, not sexual desire.

Eowyn loved Aragorn and Faramir for how they treated her, not because they were hot.

Elrond loved Celebrían, but put off marriage because it was the right thing to do, he didn’t rush to have sex.

Galadriel’s love for Gimli is purely platonic and a jab at her uncle.

Merry and Pippin follow Frodo because he’s their cousin and they care about him.

Free Graphic Novels (DC, Marvel, Image, etc), Music, TV shows, and music on HOOPLA.

Free music that you can KEEP on FREEGAL

I work in the largest library system in my state (17 branches in total).

I use it not only for ebooks, but movies as well.

Other FREE resources to check with your library for are:

Freegal Music (download and keep music, including current music)

Hoopla Digital (borrow ebooks, e-audiobooks, e-graphic novels, stream movies)

Kanopy (stream movies; also available on Roku!)

Axis360 (usually hot or just released ebooks)

If you don’t have a library card…

GET ONE!

If someone says libraries are a thing of the past…

BOOP THEM IN THE NOSE WITH YOUR KINDLE!

Don’t discount libraries as “quiet” places. 

THEY ARE ALIVE!!!

THEY ARE LOUD!!!

They had to write a letter to the NFL team they were assigned to, they had to do a research project to find out where the teams practiced, they had to write a letter to the mayor of the city the teams practiced in, they had to keep track of their team's statistics, they had to do research about the state history of the team they'd been assigned to, and they had to do a presentation.

It was a big project. She provided all the materials, she made sure there were copies of the newspaper sports section in her classroom so the kids could stay on top of stats. The students got this project in their first week at school and it wrapped up right around winter break, so it wasn't like it was an all-day "today we are doing statistics" thing or "today we do research, today we write a letter, today we make a presentation" one-week project, it was five to ten minutes a day in various subjects that got organized into a presentation at the end of the semester. The kids could work together, they could work independently, they could ask my mom or the librarian or their parents or their older siblings for help. They just had to end the semester with a report on the team's history, the stats for the season organized into a chart, copies of the letters they'd sent (and copies of any of the responses they'd gotten), a two-page social studies report on the state where the team played, and a presentation to the class about their favorite thing they had learned while doing the NFL project.

The kids fucking loved it. And for years I spent my winter break going to the classroom and organizing the bulletin board with a huge map of the US and materials from each student's report, showing the work that the students had done that semester. It was a way of getting kids engaged with classwork, because who cares about statistics at 10, probably nobody, but if you get a set of pencils from the Jets NOW you want to learn about the team. The Jaguars sent one kid a jersey one year. The city in Minnesota where the Vikings practice sent postcards for every student. Part of this was happening when Schwarzenegger was governor in California so one kid got the Terminator's autograph for part of his project.

I think maybe the thing that I admire the most about it in retrospect was the way that it taught actual project management to young students. I don't actually know of that many schools that have projects more than a month long for 10-year-olds, and I think it's a great concept. I didn't get something like that until I was a senior in college, and it would have been a great skill to learn younger.

Anyway, in 2006 my mom had to stop doing the NFL project because the district wanted to focus on raising their test scores. She was specifically told that if she kept doing the NFL project she would not be rehired at her school.

She even wrote up what standards each part of the project worked toward - the kids had to make graphs because "organizing information into a bar graph" was a specific standard for students that age. "Writing multiple paragraphs on the same subject" was a standard, which is why the letters to the cities and states were multi-paragraph. The project WAS standards based.

But the administrators wanted to make sure that the students had more practice with reading the kinds of questions that would be on the tests because most of the student body spoke Spanish at home.

My mom taught at that school for another ten years; the school's test scores never showed any marked improvement with test-based lesson plans.

My mom's project wasn't the only thing like that that got cancelled. There was another teacher who had a craft-based thing that was similar, and a 7th-grade teacher who did a kind of history/social studies Magic Schoolbus LARP thing who was told not to do that anymore. Eventually my mom was told to stop having her students write journals for ten minutes a day because it wasn't being taught from the textbook and wasn't being taught to the test.