“Harrow the Ninth” by Tamsyn Muir

Harrow the Ninth is the sequel to the first novel in the Locked Tomb series, Gideon the Ninth, which I wrote about already. I really liked the first book, but mostly because I loved the narration. Which puts a bit of a damper on any sequels, since the protagonist dies at the end of Gideon the Ninth. So I was skeptical, to put it mildly, that Harrow the Ninth could hold my attention.

And in some senses I was right, it took me forever to get into this book. I didn’t love the narration or the fact that Muir loves to not explain things to the reader. But once I got to the end, I did manage to appreciate a number of elements about the book.

To summarize, Harrow is now a Lyctor in the service of the Emperor, who is essentially God. She’s going through her training and learning that there are these things called Resurrection Beasts after the Emperor. They’re like planets that are attracted to his energy. These can be defeated by going into the River, which is like a highway that dead souls go along, and also has a hole into the depths of the universe. Plus you can use it to travel quickly. The snag is that Harrow is insane and keeps having flashbacks to an alternate version of the events in Gideon the Ninth.

We eventually learn that Harrow removed the memory of Gideon from her brain. In response to this, the souls of the characters who died in Gideon the Ninth have been stuck with her. Towards the end of the book Harrow realizes this, and they all team up to fight a separate ghost who is haunting Harrow and trying to kill her. While Harrow is in the River dealing with this, Gideon regains control of Harrow’s body and has to fight the Resurrection Beast. In the end though, the Emperor is murdered by his other Lyctors, Harrow’s ghost is exorcised, but Harrow decides to die so that Gideon can live.

All in all, it’s kind of a disappointing ending to the book. And I’m not sure where it’ll go from here. This entire book takes place in a kind of space training area and it’s hard for me to get bearings on it as the reader, and now for the next book we aren’t even sure who will be narrating it! But to back up.

Obviously this is a book that deals entirely with grief. Harrow has essentially “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”’d herself by removing Gideon’s memory. And the strange thing is that she never has to face that grief in the end. She just dies instead. Which doesn’t seem like it’s the best message to give the audience, to be perfectly honest.

What I did really like is that a lot of the characters, even Gideon, return by the end. Gideon’s voice was such a welcome change, it wasn’t altered at all and was still hilarious. And it was nice to see characters from the first book that weren’t fleshed out as much get some screen time.

But if what’s great about this book is just the references to the first one, is this book actually any good? I’m not sure. Sure there’s aspects of the overall metaphor that I appreciate, but I’m not sure that I would ever recommend this over the first novel. I think I’m solidly along for the ride here though, so we’ll just have to see how the next book, Nona the Ninth, does!

This Is Beautiful: Aro Conference

  I only found out about it the day before, but this past weekend was the first ever Aromantic Conference! It was over zoom and in a time zone on the opposite side of the world from me so I couldn't make that much of it, but it was cool to check out the panels that I could make it to.

I didn't recognize the org hosting it, I think it was called spAce malmo and most of the information was up on their Instagram account. Which didn't make for the largest gathering, I think there were 40 people on the zoom call with me. But that's ok, for a first try not bad!

It's honestly just so cool to see this community learning and growing, strangely I think the pandemic accelerated this process because many more people figured out that they're aromantic that way. I'm excited to see how this changes in the coming years!

Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week 2022

 Happy Aro Week! This is a week dedicated to celebrating the aromantic community and aromantic identities. You can learn more about aromanticism over at AUREA, an organization dedicated to promoting and supporting aros. 

An aromantic person is someone who experiences little to no romantic attraction. There really isn't a good way to define romantic attraction, and honestly you shouldn't be asking an aromantic individual to describe something they do not experience haha. But know that aromantics can still participate in romantic relationships, and may experience sexual attraction as well. Many aromantics don't want to be in romantic relationships and some prefer queer platonic relationships, or QPRs. These are platonic relationships where the members make a strong, lifelong commitment to each other.

To celebrate Aro Week, I want to encourage everyone to stop belittling platonic relationships. This can come in many forms, from describing people as "just friends" to insisting that unhappy individuals get a romantic partner to cheer themselves up. This can be toxic, not just to aromantic people but to everyone. Friendship is a wonderful thing and it deserves to be cherishes as such. 

I especially want to encourage my queer friends to stop making jokes about queer people in romantic relationships being mistaken for close friends, "just gals being pals," things of that nature. Essentially you're telling a joke where the punch line is "wow, a platonic relationship could never look like that, anyone thinking that this relationship is platonic must be an idiot." First of all, only the people within the relationship get to decide whether it is romantic or platonic. There's nothing inherently romantic about things like getting gifts, holding hands, hugging, kissing, et cetera. If you don't know how these people describe their relationship, just don't make a judgement on it. It's a lot less messy that way. 

Not to mention that plenty of people want these strong platonic relationships and making jokes about them implicitly makes fun of this. If you're saying "wow look at these gal pals" it is likely that someone is thinking that they want a relationship like that, but unironically. It alienates aromantic individuals who are more likely to want a platonic relationship.

I don't want to diminish the fact that many homophobes mistake queer romantic relationships for friendship all the time, and I think that these are often funny comments. But I also think that there's a place for people to want all kinds of different relationships in queer spaces, and these comments aren't working towards that. Many aromantics don't feel welcome and supported within queer spaces, for a multitiude of reasons other than just this one. We need to work on making sure that we're open to aros, and make sure that they know that. By being more aware of aromantic individuals in queer spaces and being more welcoming of platonic relationships, hopefully we can make our communities more inclusive. 

This Is Beautiful: Feeling Settled

 It took several weeks, but I think my mental health has made a turn for the more stable finally. This past week I finally felt settled with my new schedule and responsibilities, and even though stuff went wrong, I didn't have a full blown meltdown over it. It's nice to finally be here.

I think a large part of it is that now I feel like I'm making some progress with this experiment, it takes 21 days to complete, but I've got it going and know what the next steps are. It's a nice feeling!

I'm a little nervous about whether this'll continue or if this is temporary, but that's no way to live and I'm trying to take it all in stride. Mental health is so important, if anything this reprieve is a sign to take care of myself even more now that things have started to improve.

Aro Week Planning

February 21-26th this year is Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week! I'm super excited for it, it's always fun to have these advocacy weeks in my schedule. It's more challenging with Aro Week since it's less well known, but that doesn't make it less important. If anything it means that this work is more important than ever.

This year putting together some events were a bit of a struggle. Originally we wanted to do a student panel, similar to what we did for Ace Week in the fall. But no students were interested. So then we tried to do a panel on aromantic research, and no one was free. Well one person was free but she wanted a LOT of money so that wasn't doable. (Seriously everyone I asked said that panels didn't come with monetary compensation most of the time so I don't know what was going on here.) It has ended up being a presentation on aromantic research that I put together myself and I think it'll be a lot of fun anyways!

Which is an important aspect of activism: flexibility!!!

Our other event is a workshop on aromantic identities as well as healthy relationships! We had to work really closely with the organizer here since they aren't aromantic themselves but it's really cool to see this shaping up! I think it'll have a lot of good information in it and it definitely isn't stuff that gets talked about very often. How do you communicate what you want in any kind of relationship? What about having sex when you aren't romantically attracted to your partner? That sort of thing.

I'm really excited! I think this'll be exciting. It definitely is the biggest Aro Week that I've been a part of.

This Is Beautiful: Tech Theater

 I've talked about this in the "This Is Beautiful" segments before, but I've started getting back into theater. I was in a production of "Much Ado About Nothing" last fall, and I'm looking into doing some technical theater for a student-written production this spring. 

I've done a decent amount of tech before, I was the costume designer for my college's circus troupe and I've done a lot of props. But it's been a while, the last time I did costumes was for a community theater production of "Almost, Maine" just after I graduated. I tend to go nuts with technical theater which is why I've been staying away from it until now.

I'm hopeful that I'll be able to balance it this time, and that it'll be a fun way to keep in touch with friends that I made last semester. I think it'll be great, it's already got me pretty excited!

On Levels of Investment in Work

 So I'm a graduate student in the sciences. I've been doing research since 2013, I like to think that I know a thing or two about how to do research by now. Another important disclaimer is that I probably will exit doing research all of the time and go into teaching with a small lab on the side, I'm not about to be running a huge research lab. But hey, if you've had a different experience, feel free to get in touch! I'm open to talking about this further because I think it's interesting how other people approach this. Especially people in the humanities and other fields.

My main way of maintaining my mental health during work is to have a healthy detachment from it. I want my experiments to do well, of course, so I'm trying my best, but that's the extent of it. If the experiment works, great, if I get some little thing wrong and it doesn't work, that's fine too. I've found that if I start to get really invested in what happens that is when I start thinking "this experiment failed, I must be garbage as a scientist" and that's when things like last week's blog post happen. I end up getting super stressed out and needing to take a break from it all. 

Of course, this is partially why I want to eventually get out of research. I think it's very easy to slip into those patterns of "I need this to work or I'm screwed" and it gets so much worse with grant deadlines and things like that. So as you climb the rungs it gets harder and harder to maintain a healthy detachment from what you are working on. And you can swing the other way, the thought process of "I don't care so I won't try" type of thing (I rarely see this in science though). 

Having been in research for this long, I think I'm personally pretty good at maintaining this mentality. Everyone has their off days, but for the most part I try to not sweat the details if an experiment goes awry. But what I've noticed is that it gets so much harder when you are working with people who do sweat those details and are super invested in this. Because inevitably you start comparing yourself to them and wondering if you should be freaking out like they are. 

This is then ten times worse when that person is your supervisor or mentor. When that's the case you already want to be like them and learn from them, and it can be hard to figure out what you want to emulate and what not to. But more often than not, it's the supervisors that are heavily invested in this work, for reasons I talked about above. It's a system set up to fail!

I just wish that those that are higher up in science and mentoring graduate students would maintain a healthy attitude towards science when interacting with early career scientists. You can do whatever you want on your own time, if you think this attachment helps or something, but for me I don't find that useful for me. It would be great if mentors tried to at least meet me where I'm at and at my level of concern for the work I'm doing. Otherwise I end up having a shitty time. 

I'm doing better now, don't worry about me, but having time to think about this I do think that this pressure has had a severe negative effect on me. And I can't keep going like this for very long! Hopefully now that I'm aware of it I can try to maintain my own attitude towards science more effectively.

This Is Beautiful: The Wombats in Concert!

 I've seen the Wombats in concert 3 times: once when I was studying in Glasgow, once in DC, and now in Detroit! They're so much fun every single time. Apparently Detroit is always a hit for them, which I wasn't aware of until they commented on that last night. I'm glad I got to be part of it this time!

I was nervous about COVID going in, but honestly even if I got sick I'm pretty glad that I did this. Being in a room with all of the collective energy of everyone around you loving the event is really like nothing else. Plus hearing music from one of my favorite bands live, a lot of songs that I'd only heard over streaming thus far, was really incredible. I have much more fun at shows like this one where I know ALL OF THE WORDS and every tune is a hit than bands that I don't know as well. Not that I'd really ever say no to going to a concert, but it's different when you know all of them by heart.

Anyways, I'm exhausted since the concert was on a Monday, but it was worth it. I got a boost of energy for sure from that, which was definitely needed this week. But go see live music if you can, it's so fun and energizing!