King County voters gave a "no" to my employment

Last week, King County voters decided I should lose my job.

Allow me to explain. King County Metro, our local public transit authority, ran into a budget shortfall which it concluded could only be made up by additional revenue or service cuts. Because any and all new taxes here must go to a popular vote thanks to some initiative shenanigans in the late '90s, this required them to put it to a vote: Proposition 1, which would require people to pay an extra $60 for car tabs in order to fund transit and road maintenance.

This measure failed.

I work at a local Brooks Brothers store in Auburn, WA. I can't afford a car, so I rely on Route 181 to get to and from work...at least until September, when most of the 181 goes out of service thanks to the rejection of Prop. 1, and I'll no longer be able to keep my job.

But I shouldn't really complain. We live in a democracy, governed by the will of the people, and the people have made clear their belief that jobs should only go to those with vehicles. Or at least, that they're happy to fudge on their reported values if it means a an extra sixty bucks.

The Little Girl on the Bus

Just a short thing that happened while taking public transit.

                The little girl with the curly hair looks like a young Jasika Nicole, with a smile just as bright. With her is a woman with hair and features of iron, who stands and sits and never looks up. The girl talks and smiles and smiles and she shows some other girls the dolls she brought with her. “Watch this,” she says, popping a doll’s arm off. The other girls laugh, but then they leave, and she waves them goodbye out the bus’s window.  She presses her face against it, watching every bush and tree and stoplight with equal wonder. I grin and wave and smile with her, and when she drops her warm hat, I point it out.

                The bus stops, and the iron-faced woman stands. She tells the girl with the curly hair it’s their stop, they have to get off. She doesn’t look up. The girl peels her face from the window. She stands, turns to the woman. Doesn’t move. She turns to me, then skips over and wraps her arms around me, tight and unhesitating.

                “Thank you,” says the girl with the curly hair.

                “Yeah, uh. She’s like that sometimes,” the iron-faced woman scowls. She doesn’t look up.

                A moment passes, and I return the hug. “It was good to meet you,” I say.

                “You too,” she says, squeezing a bit tighter before she’s gone.      

On reading slowly

I hear a lot of talk from my friends and fellow readers about how they read so many books, or an entire shelf in a week, or maybe half the library. It's pretty impressive. I admire people who can burn through a thousand pages in a day and ask for more.

I'm not one of them.

I used to read just as voraciously, but I realized at some point that I wasn't enjoying the books I read. What's more, I was barely understanding them. I found that if I read a long book quickly, I could come back not a week later and find entire scenes I'd failed to understand. Sometimes, forgotten completely! From that point on, when I read, I make a point to slow down, to sip rather than to guzzle.

Slowing down has a lot of perks, but the biggest one is being able to see the layers. Regardless of genre, any story, long or short, can be read on a number of levels, and reading slowly makes that much easier. For me, writing is as much a mechanical exercise as a creative one, and I learn new techniques by dissecting what I read. That means paying attention to not only what's going on in the story, but to the craftsmanship behind it. I read and digest and reread sentences, paragraphs, sometimes entire scenes, taking them apart, examining the pieces, and figuring out how they work together. Once I understand the techniques a writer uses, I can imitate them, play with them, and incorporate them into my own writing.

Of course, examining the workings of a piece is just one way slow reading can help. You can also examine themes within the piece, gain a deeper understanding of the characters and their interactions, examine the piece within the context of real-world events, or think of it in any other way you can imagine. Perhaps you can read it on several levels at once, or perhaps you might have to read it several times to fully understand it. You might even write down your thoughts about it as you read, as I do from time to time. That's up to you.

How, then, do you slow down? If you've been reading for as long as I have, you might find you have a tendency to read faster and faster over time. This is natural: after reading a certain writer long enough, your brain will learn their style well enough that you start anticipating where their sentences will go and skimming over words and sentences. Resist this instinct. To stop my brain from speeding up and blowing through pages at a time, I try to read the story aloud, word by word, in my head, to hear the characters' voices and picture the scene. If skim though something by accident, I'll go back and reread it, then and there.

So next time you're reading something, be it for pleasure, work, or any other reason, force yourself to slow down. You might enjoy the results!

Lit Review: The Emperor's Soul

Brandon Sanderson plays with the conventions of epic fantasy in many of his works, but most of it is still epic fantasy in the classic sense. It’s what he’s comfortable with, and he’s very good at it, but the style does grow stale after reading five or six of his novels in a row.

That’s why The Emperor’s Soul surprised me, even before opening it. Here was a tiny book, barely a hundred fifty pages, with the name “Brandon Sanderson” right below the title. I judged it an aberration by the cover, and I was right. It’s short where Sanderson’s other works are lengthy. It’s fast-paced where the others are methodical, cozy and simple where the others are grand and complex, mystical and introspective where the others are precise and sweeping. The Emperor’s Soul is wildly different Sanderson’s other work, and it’s an absolute delight.

It revolves around Shai, an imprisoned con artist forced to use her magic, Forgery, to construct a new soul for the brain-damaged emperor. Forgery allows her to change objects by literally stamping a new past onto them. If the new past is plausible, the object changes. This also works for people, but doing so is vastly difficult. To Forge the emperor’s soul, she must be able to understand and explain every element of his character, which would be an immense challenge even if she weren’t confined to a cell, even if she could interact with him…and she only has a hundred days to do it.

Shai’s task is one of research, empathy, and hard, repetitive work. Forgery is both literary criticism and artistic process as a form of magic, and she spends much of the book collecting information, writing, and rewriting stories until she finds one that explains. Her effort and frustration, terror and exhaustion and elation, and her manic need to finish her project even as time runs short, even as she knows it would be safer and wiser to simply run away, capture the work of art like few other works I’ve seen.

Shai’s task blurs the lines between lie and truth, which comes out in the wonderful interactions with her imprisoner Gaotona. The two grow to understand and respect each other, learning about themselves in the process: she, teaching him the artistry in lies, he, teaching her the value of truth. This wonderfully-constructed relationship grounds the story in strong characterization, making its mystical themes solid and meaningful.

Most of Sanderson’s work moves slowly, but The Emperor’s Soul moves like lightning, its very structure as cramped and hurried as Shai herself. The book is physically small, with claustrophobic pages and short paragraphs. Pacing is quick, chapter titles bear simple timestamps instead of the artful epigraphs Sanderson often employs, and the clipped lexicon and short sentences make the words almost trip over each other in their haste. Every element of the book presses in the feeling of constriction, of time running out, making Shai’s artistic mania seem to crackle off the page.

Even to those who dislike fantasy, The Emperor’s Soul is a wonderful read. Its strong characterization and tight pacing draws you in, and its ingenious use of literary criticism and artistic process as a form of magic rings true to anybody with an interest in literature. For Sanderson’s fans, it’s even more of a treat: its utter uniqueness with respect to his other works and the references to the world of Elantris peppered within just add to it.