hiraeth.

Multilingual critical Mark

Bonus: Jackson always listens to Mark

1/? favorite pairings: mark & jinyoung

File under: Things I did not expect in this month’s Cosmopolitan, but I am quite impressed by. Now if they could write a little more about it that would be great.

Yes, it is not only a nice response, but an honest, insightful and compassionate one.  The writer has put their finger on what I think is probably the primary damage most asexuals grow up with: In a world where everyone seems obsessed with sex, where there seems to be absolutely nowhere to turn and no one to look to if you’re not, the almost inescapable conclusion (typically reinforced by the people around you if you seek advice from friends) is that you must be broken.

(And let me tell you, going through life with every movie, book, TV show, news article and poster ad–not to mention friends and family–telling you basically, “But you should want to bang this hot person right here!” starts feeling pretty rapey after a while.)

The change is slow, and subtle, and strange, as the magic works its way into our institutions. You mail letters to dead relatives, and the post office starts delivering their replies. Late-night bus routes stop at places never seen on any atlas. Libraries suddenly include subterranean archives where you can look anything you’ve ever forgotten, from the names of your favorite childhood books to the precise flavor of your first-ever chocolate chip cookie. 

The people working at these places take the changes in stride. The letters from the dead just show up every morning, sorted and stamped and ready for delivery, so why not carry them? Bus drivers follow the maps they’re given without trouble, and learn to accept even small gold coins as more than adequate fare. Electricians get used to seeing warding symbols in circuit diagrams, while clerks at the DMV find a stack of forms for registering ghostly steeds as personal vehicles, and sigh in relief at finally having that particular bureaucratic headache solved. The firefighters are shocked the first time they see a giant of living water burst out from a hydrant, but after it rescues several of them from a burning building, they decide not to ask questions. They tell their stories to others, though, and soon word of the changes is spreading. 

There’s no single moment of realization where everyone discovers that magic is real; the knowledge just creeps into day to day life a bit at a time, and society adapts. Cyber-safety programs teach people to never accept a file from the electric fairies without sharing one in return, and to never accept their Terms and Conditions without searching for the subsection on Souls, Forfeiture Thereof. Students leave offerings of coffee and boxed wine to petition the School Spirit for lower tuition or exam deferrals. Nurses learn the hours when Death stalks the hospital hallways, and keep bedside vigils in the children’s ward. They bring board games and cards for when the reaper is feeling playful, and well-worn baseball bats for when he isn’t. 

First, of course, there’s the vast subterranean archives themselves, which suddenly appear–complete with a door. And thank goodness these things are cataloged already because there’s ways to catalog or accession a chocolate bar or a pair of shoes or a box of crackers or a video or a photograph, but the smell of someone’s preschool is another thing entirely (not that the AACR wouldn’t figure a way to do it, but this saves some time). 

The thing is that these subterranean archives have really good climate control and plenty of space. So many libraries just kind of annex the space for their rarest and most fragile materials, which frees up space for more and other things. It’s a win-win. And as it turns out, thanks to national and then international cross-checking, they’re also all connected. So, yes, you can go to your hometown in Ohio to look up exactly what every street looked like in 1978 but you can also look that same information up in the New York Public Library. No need for off-site repositories or backups here. Win-win-win.

Second, of course, are the people who start coming into the libraries asking for things like a picture of an ancestor’s grave from 1620. No, not a current picture, a picture from 1620. Or for the records for the taste of Ecto-Cooler from 1989. Or the complete memories of their grandparents’ wedding–both perspectives, please. Or for that preschool smell, sure. And when you start getting questions like this, you realize you’ve got to start providing answers.

The cataloging system is idiosyncratic. To say the least. But it works. And no one can really figure out how to change it, even if they could. Like, this thing is more complex than GPO cataloging and, infuriating to the more formal among the members of ALA and other library organizations, it works best when you go at it intuitively. So you need this picture of a grave from 1620–you can go at it from pictures, graves, or your own family. The librarian knows it’s there, but it’s going to take some looking through the stacks to put your hands on it. And you will find it. It’s just not as efficient as looking up an exact call number. It’s less structured and more intuitive. It also requires logging into a separate OPAC to look things up. It’s just a whole other system and–hang on, does anyone here know how to read Sumerian? Because that’s what this record is written in and we really need it. It requires developing new skills, which is always a good thing. Collaboration with local experts becomes absolutely necessary and completely delightful.

And sometimes, late in the evening, just before the library closes, the whole building gets cold and the lights flicker and the librarians give each other a knowing look because that always means that someone got into a particular part of the closed stacks down there. But some of them roll their eyes because the same thing would happen at other libraries for the same reasons–and that was back before the new archives opened. Either way, it’s going to be a Whole Thing pretty soon.

Unfortunately, all the materials are reference materials; they don’t circulate and can’t be checked out. But your library card will grant you access to the new archives. And the librarians would like to digitize what they can of these new collections…