Jan. 28, 1986

I don’t know how this is even possible, but it has been four decades since Generation X gathered around clunky old televisions wheeled into classrooms all over the country to watch what we assumed would be a fairly ordinary space shuttle launch.

My classmates and I were excited. The Challenger was carrying Christa McAuliffe, the winner of the Teacher in Space competition. We had mixed feelings about that, because our teacher, Edd Little, had been a runner-up in the competition, and we were a bit offended that he hadn’t won. We still thought the idea was pretty cool, but we couldn’t figure out why the judges had snubbed OUR teacher, who had a working darkroom in his classroom, gave us worms to dissect in science class, and let us take turns playing Oregon Trail on the Apple IIe next to his desk whenever we got done with our work early. How could anybody one-up that?

Seventy-three seconds after liftoff, we stared at the screen with a strange mix of gratitude and sorrow, trying to make sense of what we had just witnessed and feeling terrible for all those students whose teacher had won the contest and whose elation at her accomplishment had exploded into fiery tragedy against a cobalt sky.

I don’t know how Mr. Little got through that day. I don’t know what went through his mind. He never told us. He came within an eyelash of being aboard a doomed spacecraft, watched that spacecraft explode on live television, stepped out for a minute to catch his breath, came back in, and kept teaching, because he wasn’t about to hand his kids off to a sub after we’d just witnessed a traumatic event that no one in the building could understand or explain better than he could.

The magnitude of his dedication didn’t register with me at the time, but looking back now, it occurs to me that Mr. Little is probably the main reason I don’t take personal days.

After watching a runner-up for the Teacher in Space program make it through Jan. 28, 1986, without ducking out early to go day drinking, I can’t really justify taking a day off for anything less than a dire emergency.

Emily

Feminist theory: Rahab

This is the second in an occasional series of posts applying literary theory to Bible texts. In this post, I examine a passage from the Book of Joshua through a feminist lens. As with my previous post in this series, this is an invitation to think, but it is not an invitation to a debate, because there’s no point in debating an article of faith; by definition, faith is believing that which cannot be proven, so it is impossible to win or lose a debate about something you have accepted or rejected on faith.

One of my favorite characters in the Bible is Rahab, the Jericho woman who hides a couple of Israeli spies in exchange for a promise of protection for her family.

You can read the story here if you’re not familiar with it or just want to jog your memory. (I linked the KJV, but Bible Gateway has a dropdown menu at the top that lets you pick other translations if you prefer.)

Some pastors hold up Rahab as an example of how God uses people in spite of their flaws, pointing to her career choices as evidence of her unworthiness and suggesting that she helped the spies in a bid to please a deity she knew only by reputation.

While that reading of the story offers a convenient redemption arc, I find it a bit reductive, and I’m not sure it’s entirely supported by canon. Nothing in the text states that Rahab feels any regret about her chosen career or has any intention of abandoning it after the war, nor do the spies suggest that she should.

Give the narrative a close read through a feminist lens, and Rahab becomes a much more complex character with a richer, more nuanced story: She owns a successful business in a controversial and probably competitive industry. She is a smart, politically savvy woman who keeps her ear to the ground and gathers enough information to ascertain the likely outcome of an impending war. When the opportunity presents itself, she negotiates a successful contract with a pair of enemy spies to provide both intel and material assistance in exchange for assurances that her family will be spared when the excrement contacts the cooling unit.

This is not a remorseful sinner groveling in shame. This is a formidable woman who thinks fast on her feet and bargains with enemy spies to protect her family.

I like this Rahab: gutsy, unapologetic, and purely transactional. Her willingness to stick her neck out on behalf of her relatives is all the more remarkable when you consider the likelihood that her profession was probably a point of contention in the family — and yet, it’s that very profession that prepared her for the situation. Nobody is going to be better than the local madam at providing discreet lodging for a couple of guys, lying with a straight face when someone comes looking for them, and sneaking them out the back window.

I don’t for one instant think that God used Rahab in spite of her profession. I think he used her because of her profession, which gave her a very particular set of skills that were precisely what the moment required.

Emily

Quiet weekend

This weekend was very quiet, thanks to the cold weather. We didn’t get a whole lot of snow, and what we had didn’t stick around very long, but the outrageously low temperatures kept us inside. I spent the second half of my weekend curled up in bed with Honey and Marley watching over me while I slept off an overtraining injury — my first of this training cycle, and hopefully my last.

It’s nothing serious — just a cranky illiotibial band, which I’ve dealt with before — but it was a good reminder that I need to be stretching properly before and after runs and doing some weight training three or four days a week. I’ve always been sloppy about that, and every now and then, it catches up to me.

Emily

Warmth from the inside out

One of the best potato soup recipes in the known universe can be found in The Mother Earth News Almanac. It is easy to make, thick, warm, filling, and absolutely perfect on a cold day in the dead of winter. I’ve made it for years. My version isn’t 100% faithful to the original, but it’s still one of my favorite things to eat in January.

Potato-Cheese Soup
Adapted from The Mother Earth News Almanac

2 good-sized potatoes
1 small onion, chopped finely
3 tbsp. butter (use Irish if you can get it)
2 tbsp. flour
Shredded cheddar to taste
Celery salt to taste
Cider vinegar to taste (optional)

Chunk up the potatoes, cover with water, and boil until soft.

While the potatoes cook, saute the onion in the butter until it is clear and starts to caramelize. Add the flour and heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture starts to brown and smells like heaven.

When the potatoes are fork-tender, shut off the heat and whisk them until they disintegrate in the cooking water. Add the onion mixture and continue to whisk until the soup reaches a nice, thick texture. If it’s too thick, add a little water to thin it; if it’s too thin, simmer it for a while with the lid off, stirring frequently, until it thickens up.

To serve, put a handful of shredded cheddar in the bottom of your bowl, then add the soup and stir to melt the cheese. Season with celery salt to taste. The original recipe suggests adding a few drops of vinegar to each bowl, which is something I wouldn’t have considered, but it actually works pretty well, especially if you like salt and vinegar potato chips.

I’ll be making a batch of this soup for lunch today to chase off the shivers, as Tucumcari — like much of the country — is in the middle of a nasty cold snap.

Hope you’re warm and have something nice for lunch, wherever you are.

Emily

Disability theory: Was Jesus autistic?

NOTE: This is the first in an occasional series of posts applying literary theory to the Bible. It is an invitation to think, but it is not an invitation to a debate, because I simply don’t have the time for that.

In recent months, I’ve been dismayed to hear horror stories about churches making neurodivergent parishioners feel unwelcome. That’s pretty audacious behavior for people who claim to worship the most autistic-coded character in all of literature.

Consider my info-dump evidence:

• John 8: Jesus ignores everybody and avoids eye contact while writing in the dirt with his finger. He responds only after repeated attempts to get his attention, and once he’s said his piece, he goes right back to ignoring everybody and writing in the dirt while he waits for the neurotypicals to figure out that he’s completely outmaneuvered them. Iconic.
• Luke 2:49-52: Jesus, age 12, goes missing for three days (elopement?hyperfocus? time blindness?) but is eventually found expounding on the Torah at a precocious level that suggests savant syndrome and/or hyperlexia. When his mom chastises him for scaring his parents, he seems baffled, because they should have known where he’d be: gleefully info-dumping about his special interest to a group of like-minded adults.
• Matt. 9:11-12, Luke 6:1-10, Luke 7:37-47, and John 4:7-9: Jesus routinely offends the uptight neurotypicals in charge of Hebrew society by disregarding their arbitrary social rules about who is allowed to sit at the cool kids’ table and when people are allowed to eat.
• Luke 8:1-3: His followers include several women, but the Gospels all heavily imply that he is ace/aro. Autism shows up at elevated rates in this demographic.
• John 18:28-19:11: He talks in circles, seems wholly unimpressed by titles, and shows a high degree of emotional detachment in the face of an existential threat.
• Mark 4:11-12: He shows zero interest in dumbing down his parables so the normies can understand them.
• Mark 4:13 and Matt. 7:15-17: He seems downright impatient with people who don’t understand him or can’t keep up with him.
• John 2:14-17, Mark 11:15-12, and Matt. 21:12-13: He starts literally flipping tables when he catches the moneychangers ripping people off in the temple. Perceived injustice is a pretty common trigger for meltdowns.
• Luke 23:39-43 and John 19:25-27: He manages to carry on meaningful conversations while being physically and psychologically tortured. The ability to dissociate in painful situations is another fairly common autistic trait.
• Luke 5:16: This is one instance of a recurring motif: When the crowd gets too thick, Jesus dips, which seems like odd behavior for a celebrity preacher.
• Matthew 4: Jesus takes off on a camping trip and doesn’t eat for 40 days. Intentional fast, or just dodgy interoception exacerbated by hyperfocus? This scene occurs immediately after he is baptized by his cousin John, who seems about as neurotypical as Rain Man. Neurodivergence runs in families, so that tracks.

I’m sure I’ll get blowback from people who insist that the perfect Lamb of God couldn’t have been autistic, but given the nature of his mission, I don’t think autism is a blemish so much as a necessity.

Emily

Theoretical lenses

When I was in grad school, I was required to take a class on literary theory. The readings were incredibly dry and dense and generally more work than they were worth, but the application was fun. Example: One week, the professor told us to apply a Marxist lens to a text we were working with and write a brief report to share with the class. I was teaching children’s lit at the time, so I gave a Marxist reading of Green Eggs and Ham, in which I posited that Sam-I-Am is essentially the Costco sample lady from hell. I also noted that Sam foreshadowed the rise of fast food, as he eventually wore his target down through ubiquitous marketing and impressed him with convenience rather than quality. The whole class ate it up with a spoon like it tasted good.

I still can’t believe I got away with that.

There are all sorts of theoretical lenses you can apply to a text. For instance:

• Queer theory: How are LGBTQIA+ characters portrayed in this text?
• Disability theory: How are disabled characters portrayed in this text?
• Feminist theory: How are female characters portrayed in this text?
• Race theory: How are characters of color portrayed in this text?
• Psychoanalytic theory: How do Freud’s ideas about the human psyche apply to the characters in this text?

Put all those lenses together and apply them to the villain in a fantasy or horror novel, and you have monster theory, which gives you a pretty clear snapshot of how Othering functions in a given time and place. (Try it with the Harry Potter series if you want to understand why we really shouldn’t have been surprised when J.K. Rowling turned out to be an incorrigible bigot.)

If you want to dig deeper into a text, you really can’t go wrong by picking whichever theoretical lens floats your boat and applying it to whatever you’re reading at the moment.

I mention all this because I have spent the past few months reading parts of the Bible through various theoretical lenses, and it has been very illuminating. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to do a series of occasional posts along those lines. I expect this will delight some readers and enrage others. Either way, if it forces people to think, I’ll consider it a success.

Stay tuned.

Emily

Biding my time

Have I mentioned that I loathe winter?

It is exactly three weeks until the Cubs’ pitchers and catchers report to spring training. As far as I’m concerned, winter ends the day spring training starts. It’s right in the name: SPRING training.

The ancient Celts had an even better idea: They marked the beginning of spring on Feb. 1, a.k.a. Imbolc, a.k.a. St. Brigid’s Day. According to their religion, that was the day the Cailleach either handed the reins back to Brigid or transformed into Brigid, depending on who was telling the story. I like the latter story; the idea of Brigid aging into the Cailleach, then regenerating into her youthful aspect with the return of spring, just feels right to me.

Either way, if you follow the Celtic calendar, we’re just 11 days from spring.

I can live with that.

Emily

Winter

The weather has finally remembered that it is January. It is obnoxiously cold. I hate it. That is all.

Emily

Good dog!

Honey is learning a new trick. I am training her to come over and rest her front paws and the front half of her body on my lap when I flap my hands. Once she’s gotten the hang of it and will come running as soon as she sees that signal, I’m going to add rocking, covering my ears, and maybe crying.

The goal is for her to recognize signs that neurodivergent students are getting overwhelmed and offer her reassuring weight, soft fur, and grounding presence to help them re-regulate in time to avoid a meltdown, because a meltdown can ruin a kid’s whole day.

I’m not sure what you call a task-trained therapy dog. The term “service dog” doesn’t really apply, because Honey isn’t going to be attached to one specific person all day; she’ll just hang out in my room like she usually does, but if somebody happens to get overstimulated during my class, she’ll run interference. I don’t know whether anybody else has ever done this, but it seems like a natural progression, given Honey’s existing work and her aptitude for learning new tricks.

Emily

Quiet weekend

I didn’t get to go to the prison in Clayton on Saturday because I had game duty at school. Normally, I’d try to arrange for my two mandatory game-duty days to be on weekdays so I wouldn’t have to miss my weekly trip to Clayton, but when it was time to set the schedule this fall, I noticed we were playing Santa Rosa a couple of times and signed up for those dates so I could see some of my friends and former students.

The kids split a pair of games — Santa Rosa won the seventh-grade game, and Tucumcari won the eighth-grade game — and everybody played well. I was proud of all of my kids from both schools.

I wound up going back to school after lunch to spend a few hours working in my classroom. The quiet in an empty school is strange but oddly soothing, and it’s always satisfying to walk out into a crisp winter evening knowing that I’m ready for the coming week.

When I got home, I put in 27.1 miles on the bike, which is the longest ride I’ve ever done. I didn’t even break a sweat, although I was starving by the time I finished. (Granted, I had the tension turned down to the lowest setting and maintained a pretty sedate pace so I wouldn’t wreck myself, but I’m still surprised it was that easy.)

I hope your weekend was as productive and enjoyable as mine.

Emily