ThatRegencyGrrrl

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

“Octopus,” she said, all curls and smiles.

“And what kind of animal is an octopus?” I asked.  I was looking for “fish” or “sea creature” but I would have accepted almost anything–”weird,” “gross,” even “slimy.”  “Underwater” or “it lives in the ocean” would have also been acceptable. 

She looks me right in the eye and says, happy as a clam, “It’s a cephalopod.”

I explained the delicate situation to my mom, as my sister-in-law is letting the news get out by word-of-mouth from the immediate family rather than an awkward “unsave-the-date”. My mom obviously told my own family.

The apocalypse is not a single event hovering in the future bearing down on us while we sit helplessly. We are at least 150 years into an ongoing "apocalypse."

The eastern USA's natural environments were fucking razed. We went scorched earth on everything.

In the 1930's, DEER and WILD TURKEYS were almost eliminated from my state. Deer. Wild turkeys. Common animals that you can see all the time.

I've seen animals close to my home that a person in the 1970's would not have been able to see. I saw river otters and a bald eagle a couple months ago! Farmer family friend remembers when a bald eagle sighting here made the news. There is a thriving population of elk (16,000 animals) in the Appalachian Mountains, for the first time since before 1850!

One of my professors was straight up like "I don't want you reading papers about this book until we finish it!" and we had writing things for the first 20 minutes of every class because he wanted to know what WE thought, not what we had become convinced was THE thing to think.

When I was in my second year of college, I spiraled out into this whole "Jane Eyre is a lesbian!" thing, and my professor (not the same guy as above but delightfully insane in her own right) was like, "Wow, I've never heard this from anyone," and instead of being like, "um this is not what has been agreed upon by everyone else" went "Tell me more." Now, as a forty year old woman who has never stopped engaging with stories on both an enjoyment and academic level, the paper I would write with age and distance would be more "Homosociality, desire, and the domesticated male in Jane Eyre" or something like that, nineteen year old me was a little reductive and simple, but same vibes.

But my professor did not think I was right, she thought I was being INTERESTING, and so she encouraged me and championed me to write that paper and I actually presented it at the student division of a conference! The cool thing about that was, that when I was defending it, I was having to think about it, but it was in the spirit of collaboration, it felt like. No one was trying to 'win' the conversation.

Doc, what the fuck are you--I saw a really interesting thing this morning, someone talking about Shrek, of all things, and how they thought it was about how you cannot turn an ogre into a man, but he can make you become an ogre. And I immediately went, "Wow! Okay, interesting, not how I read that at all, TELL ME MORE." It was really jarring for me, then, to see pretty much every comment be like, 'uh you are wrong and also stupid." Sure, maybe that's not the intention of the work, but I don't for one goddamn motherfucking second think Charlie Bronte was sitting down going "I am going to write a woman so gay..." nor do I think the read of her as same sex-attracted is the end all be all of interpretations. It's mine, for sure! But like...talking about stories is supposed to be fun and it's supposed to be about possibility.

That one post got me thinking about how we are, in fandom often all looking at this same text, and there's immense pressure to have a 'right' interpretation--I was at the nexus of so many Sailor Moon fandom wars, and while I got into a few tussles, I was also stupid to do that. This characters are not real, and I was shutting down POSSIBILITY. And even after I was like, 'Wow, I don't think this is actually a very fun way to do stuff" it turns out you can't magically give everyone the same revelation you have simultaneously. Which is upsetting. And I see these same patterns repeat over and over and over again.

In my old age, I'm less interested in he "He would not say that" and more interested in "Cool, tell me why he would say that?"

Don't misunderstand me, there are points of view and ideas on different texts where I'm like, "Hm. I don't care to engage with that." Remember that the window we're looking out of is as important as what we're looking at, and will DOUBTLESS change the appearance. But the whole reason we have each other is to try and find other windows! It's not actually to find someone who is the next pane of glass in your same window. I miss that environment, where you could trust that everyone coming to the table was engaging with the same ground rules and that there was an expectation of, detachment doesn't quite get to the heart of what I'm talking about, but we were expected not to take the text or the analysis of it personally, even when it was hard. And sometimes it was. But I think it led to me having--for example it's crazy to me to have one 'right read' on any given text. I had a SUPER FUCKING ANIMATED conversation with a fellow lit nerd about whether or not GdT's Frankenstein was emotionally faithful to the text (which is not the same as being literally faithful nor the same as being good)and it was so fun, EVEN THOUGH we were coming at it completely opposed. But it was so fucking fun.

I wish I could do that with anime and cartoons, but you can't. People take Shrek personally. So I'll never have that same fun.

Phrases I think are delightful and useful:

if fandom makes you feel like you swallowed a beehive with the bees still alive then you aren't actually having fun!

something that has Unzipped you