Finding a Future in Your Dirty Dishes

By Jesse Stewart, Staff Writer

Far rarer than oil, money, or love, time seems to be the scarcest resource of all. There never seems to be quite enough to go around, despite an abundance of machines designed to free our hands, minds, and attention. Technology helps clear our schedules more than ever before, yet we feel busier than we’ve ever been. It seems that there’s not enough hours in the day, but what if I told you that you already own an instrument that can help you slow the sands of time?

There are approximately eighty million dishwashers in the United States and, if you ask me, that’s about eighty million too many. In numerous polls, half of all Americans feel anxiety due to a perception of not having enough time in the day, despite more than 75% of all households owning a dishwasher, a machine designed for the expressed purpose of freeing up the user’s obligations to cleaning their cutlery and tableware.

The Industrial Revolution promised us that machines would take over the menial duties that burdened human beings, who would then possess more time for thinking, dreaming, loving, and all of those other pesky requirements for peace of mind. But, instead, the Revolution only seemed to grant those that owned the machines more money to buy the other machines and lease them to us at steadily increasing prices. You win some, you lose some; but, until the next Revolution, you can practice liberating your schedule by taking back the ‘pointless’ burdens from the machines, and why not start with the dishwasher?

I once lived in a country where no household, no matter how wealthy or poor, owned a dishwasher. I was quite busy with my work but was forced to spend twenty minutes each day cleaning the food from my plates, knowing full well I would simply do the exact same exercise the following day. One could describe the motions of lathering a dish with soap, scrubbing it clean, and wiping it dry as ‘mindless’, but that’s only if you choose not to use your mind.

Tasseography is a fortune-telling method that involves pouring tea into a cup, draining the liquid, and reading the tea leaves on the bottom for patterns and symbolic guidance. If you see a heart, then maybe love is on the horizon but if you spot a snake then perhaps you should be prepared for betrayal. This practice is, by any metric, complete nonsense that no machine would ever be programmed for, nor would any sane human being take instruction from. However, finding inspiration or perspective in a misshapen illusion, be it the shape of a cloud or hue of a sunset, is not an exercise in delusion but imagination and vulnerability.

I’m enrolled in a university and am employed at two companies, so there exist very few grains of free time in the hourglass that hangs from me like an anchor. However, I wash my dishes thoroughly and carefully each day despite the fact that my American apartment has a perfectly functional dishwasher just beside the sink. I may spend twenty minutes a day doing this, all to the seeming-detriment of the precious unencumbered moments that I reach for otherwise. Why?

Every so often, I can look at the bubbles on my dinner plate and read into them like tea leaves. My computer instructs me to inspect an email, just as my phone orders me to open a text message, but I find that the suds on my dish often have surprising suggestions about what my time would be better spent on. Succeeding in your work often involves looking into a screen for the answers, but solutions to what ail you in life, death, and the love between are often found in the sink. Food may be required to sustain life, but cleaning its residue causes you to reflect on the consequences of your consumptions.

The human brain operates using a structure of pattern recognition. We’re all very talented when it comes to receiving and executing commands because doing so requires very little thought. However, your thoughts are not only what separate you from machines but also the only tangible resource that define you. I can trace maybe a third of all of the best ideas I’ve ever had to the thoughts that creep into my consciousness only when it is occupied with something simple.

Only the wealthy have the money to build a zen garden and the time to meditate there. Not all of us can live near some tranquil lake and guess what the clouds in its reflection are trying to tell us. But for the rest of us, no matter how busy, no matter how many projects or tests or obligations that seem to vie for our attention, can each create our own private pond in the kitchen and look into those misshapen soap clouds for inspiration. By no means would a machine ever detect a dream hidden in your dishes, but that’s because it acts without thinking, simply scrubbing away the sands of time rather than letting them accumulate into some malformed fantasy, one which only you can find the pearls of an idea inside…

…Plus, they never really wash off ALL of the barbeque sauce on your plate, you know? Gross.

Album Review: David W. Jacobsen's POTUS

Jacob W. Jacobsen’s POTUS album cover

By: Jesse Stewart, Staff Writer

The last ten years of politics have brought with them an abysmal scourge of un-funny and uncreative ‘satire’, skewering politicians and ideologies simply for the smug self-satisfaction of the artist and their own personal beliefs. It seems as if art that addresses political figures no longer needs to possess any subtlety or craftsmanship, as the effort exists only to appease audiences by dogmatically adhering to a particular group’s preconceived notions and unchallenged perspectives.

However, existing in contrast to the sorry state of political satire, David W. Jacobsen’s most recent album POTUS functions not only as an excellent analysis of some of American history’s lesser-known or lesser-liked presidents, but offers a witty and sometimes even rather poignant perspective as well.

Bad artistry in satire can be easily spotted in instances when an artist succumbs to insecurity and arrogance by peppering their work with direct references to their own intelligence and cleverness, rather than letting the audience arrive at that admiration on their own. Jacobsen’s lyrical prowess may be wry but the construction of his points (as well as his relatively obscure choices of subject matter) create a very fulfilling portrait of what it means to be buried in history despite having such a clear mark on it.

Figures such as John Adams, Andrew Johnson, and Richard Nixon might be well known, but Jacobsen’s choice of analyzing their lesser-known actions, speeches, and works in the way of catchy little tunes, jumping between genres and tone, work together to create a Schoolhouse-Rock-by-way-of-James Taylor lesson through the chapters of America’s history that aren’t printed with the same bold ink as more obvious events. His analysis and perspective on presidents John Quincy Adams, Zachary Taylor, and Chester A. Arthur are quite competent and intriguing as well, choosing to portray the insecurities that come with leadership in a way that don’t come across as pandering endorsements nor scathing indictments.

As someone with an active interest in both history and art, the kind of person that might flirt with the young woman at a party by recounting some of the less-dull chapters of the Memoir of Ulysses S. Grant or quoting the love letters between John Adams and his wife Abigail, I cannot overstate how simply competent, well-researched, and engaging this collection of songs is. Jacobsen makes it quite clear what books and documents serve as a reference to his lyrics but the way in which he composes feathery and discrete melodies around what would otherwise be heavy and obvious points creates a very dynamic listening experience. The particular aspects of each president’s life that he chooses to hone in on and extrapolate a tune from is pretty remarkable.

Regardless of your political leanings, I think it is safe to say that at least half of our presidents were not up to par. Personally, I think you can make a great case that about ninety-percent of the men that have occupied the position committed acts that they should have been tried and punished for (for those of you doing the math at home: that’s about five innocent people in a quarter of a millennium). I would argue, generally, that he chose some of the objectively-obscure aspects of these men’s lives and found a weird little chunk of humanity in each of them that otherwise would either go completely un-remarked-upon or only noticed by my fellow weirdos that like to tell friends what we read about on Wikipedia at three in the morning, “Did you know Rutherford B. Hayes is basically a founding father of Paraguay? ...What do you mean you don’t know what Paraguay is?”

I can honestly say, without hyperbole, that I was disappointed with the album’s runtime, as I could have easily listened to thirty-four more tracks about the unaddressed men who also occupied that office (there have been forty-six presidencies but only forty-five presidents, try that one at parties too). David W. Jacobsen’s POTUS is a worthy album, measuring for both your time and education, with no better time to educate yourself on your country’s former leaders than on this President’s Day.

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David W. Jacobsen’s POTUS can be found on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube.

How to Fly Your Elephant into the New Year

By: Jesse Stewart, Staff Writer

One of the greatest days of my life came when I was quite young, sitting in science class. I was always a good student, but had trouble when assignments grew into multi-day or multi-week endeavors. The stress of a science fair project felt like an elephant sitting on my chest: daunting and impossible to know where to start. The Dumbos of my youth were gone, and this new pachyderm packed quite a punch.

As a child you assume that the world is either entirely orderly or pure chaos; growing older and understanding that neither is particularly true can be a demoralizing and paralyzing recognition of the challenging mountain each of us must climb. But the day I first learned about the relationship between potential and kinetic energy, in the form of Newton's First Law of Motion, I saw the peaks before me shift into ramps so that I may fly, if I flapped my wings consistently (I also had big ears, which helped).

Newton’s First Law of Motion describes ‘inertia’, the natural law that states an object in motion tends to stay in motion and an object at rest tends to stay at rest, also known as ‘momentum.’ The morning I learned that such a succinct force governed the universe, and therefore my little life as well, was the day I learned how to transform my mountains into ramps: pebble by pebble, and feeding the elephant only one peanut at a time. 

One of the most annoying tidbits passed around every Christmastime is the that gym memberships increase by about twelve percent each January, as the population attempts their “New Year’s Resolutions,” with these figures dropping off only a month or two later. I was a pedantic child, who grew up to be a very pedantic man, so at literally no point have I felt anything other than dumbfounded shock that people assign self-improvement to something so arbitrary as the calendar, probably lecturing some adults at a Christmas party, “Santa Claus is definitely real, the Easter Bunny is my best friend, and the TV says that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction…but I wasn’t born yesterday: you dorks are lazy.”

Losing weight, reading more books, and pursuing any form of self-improvement is an obviously noble goal…but what happens if you fail? How quickly and how easily will you revert to confirmation bias when you bite off more than you can chew, doze off before you finish the chapter, or grow weary of the pursuit by St. Patrick’s Day? No one will punish you for making, breaking, and then ignoring a promise you made to yourself, but to then reach another New Years and again lie, “This is my time, this is the year I do it” is an exercise in insanity, is it not?

One of the root words of ‘Resolution’ is ‘resolve,’ which is a very strong and misunderstood concept; the reason that so many New Year’s Resolutions fail is that the consequences of breaking a promise to oneself are not only unconsidered but never drafted in the first place.

When seeking self-improvement, the first rule is to not assign it to something as arbitrary as the date. Start today. Want to get into shape? Give yourself one task, like doing a single sit-up; tease the elephant a single peanut and you’ll be surprised how fast that formidable foe can move. But drop a tiny mouse behind it, give yourself a small ultimatum: if you miss a day of pursuing your resolution, you’re not allowed to indulge in your favorite food or drink for a week.

The next day, increase your measurement by one: two sit-ups. The elephant might struggle to eat two peanuts at once, but it certainly won’t want to be caught by the slightly bigger mouse you drop behind it. You will climb your mountain, because you’re only focusing on one pebble at a time and maintaining a rhythm that will enforce itself; by focusing on the momentum carried toward a goal rather than the speed, you will develop a habit, which is infinitely less stupid than a ‘resolution’ as it has a rather compelling enforcement mechanism: your happiness and state of mind.

If you start with a single sit-up and increase this action by one with each new square on your calendar, rather than each new page, in less than three years you and your elephant will be a couple of lunatics who can do a thousand sit-ups in a day and feel unhappy about missing a workout. The Grand Canyon didn’t ‘resolve’ to carve itself into something so spectacular, it did it drop-by-drop over the course of time, with the threat of not reaching the ocean as motivation.

The reason why it can be so difficult to grow up, mature, and improve is because we request results all at once and activate our attempts so abruptly. You cannot simply install an improvement into your life, it must be adopted, grown, and maintained.

Pick any improvement you seek and break it into 1% increments: in just over three months you’ll achieve it. It’s exactly that easy and exactly that difficult. But as you achieve momentum, it will be quite difficult for you to slow down or stop; setting a slow but steady rhythm of advancement will slowly transform your resolution into a trait, one which will be hard to peel from your identity. It took a long time to build Rome and a long time for it to fade; anything built brick-by-brick cannot decay any other way.

New Year’s Resolutions so often fail or fade because they exist without balance: the hope of improvement must be propelled by a consequence of failure. Never again wait until the Januarys of your life to address the elephant in your room. It’s not sitting on your chest, it’s nudging you. Scratch it behind the ears, hop on the saddle, scale the mountains before you, and prance over the edge. No matter how heavy it seems, you have my (and Newton’s) word: anything with a running start can fly.

The Diminishing Value of Your Vote

By: Jesse Stewart, Staff Writer

Osman Hamdi Bey, "The Tortoise Trainer" (1906), oil on canvas

Just before his death, Osman Hamdi Bey painted a portrait of an old man attempting to train tortoises and succeeded in indirectly depicting the inherent deficiencies of a dying government. Bey was the preeminent artist during the Tanzimat, a time when the Ottoman Empire was struggling to adopt the technological innovations of Europe while preserving their sense of identity and culture. In his 1906 painting, The Tortoise Trainer, Bey displays the simple scene of an elder (who bears a resemblance to the painter himself) using a flute and vegetables to train the tortoises at his feet.

The image is a satirical one; regardless of who the man and the reptiles are meant to represent, he is an antiquated figure in antiquated garb and using antiquated techniques to coach creatures for a pointless purpose (tortoises were once used as living decorations but certainly no longer by 1906), rendering this entire moment an anachronism: there is no reform or action that the Ottoman government can take to salvage itself, as the political structures by which it operates are the very nooses slowly tightening around its neck.

You can look at The Tortoise Trainer and think of the Ottoman Empire, ‘destined’ to fall and fracture after World War One, but I see the United States in every brushstroke, a comparison quite evident not just by the candidates of the 2020 election but attitude of its voters.

In November of 2016, citizens saw the election of Donald Trump as an event that signaled either a potential collapse of the American identity or a partial restoration of its virtues. The attitude and demeanor of the average person either plummeted or was driven to elation. Now they beat the drums again, for the ‘most important election in history’, as if such a thing were true and as if this mindset weren’t rooted in a mania brought on by impatience, ignorance, and some measure of ideological insanity.

Let’s look closer at the trainer and their turtles, shall we?

The average American voter is very intelligent, routinely consuming a diet of facts, figures, statistics, and historical precedents so that they can feel and appear superior to one another. The average American voter is woefully unwise, completely unable to divorce their ego from their conclusions and unable to accept a reality that may rob them of any autonomy they assume to possess. The average American voter is catastrophically insecure and more than willing to take this out on anyone around them in the form of angry ignorance, "Look, the candidate isn't my first choice but it's better than the alternative."

Wearing an ugly yellow sweater because it's the only warm top that goes well with my boots isn't my 'first choice' and 'better than the alternative' of wearing nothing at all, but this is a vote I make in my closet, that has an impact of one day at the most, and really only affects me. Stepping into a voting booth and punching the ballot for a specific party has an impact of four years at the very least, and at that point the concept of a 'lesser evil' is less of a call for pragmatism and more of a diffusion of responsibility.

America is very young in that it has only ever had one dominant political system. In fact, it's really the only current country in the world that has maintained the same general system of government for the last two centuries. This inexperience means that even its most politically-minded citizens don't quite understand the concept of a 'mandate.' For example, the Chinese dynasties operated under a 'mandate of heaven' for about three thousand years, justifying the emperor's rule over the people as an assertion that he was the 'son of heaven' and therefore entitled to lead them. Regardless of whether or not it was believed, this mandate was only as good as the happiness of the people. If infrastructure decayed or too many wars were lost, "How could this man be the son of heaven?" might be the reaction, giving another faction the opportunity to seize the people’s mandate and establish a new government. This has happened many times, in some form or another, in basically every country that exists...other than the United States.

Richard Nixon is not well-regarded today, but he is emblematic of Republican platform during his tenure in the same way that John F. Kennedy is viewed by most Democrats as being one of their best executive representatives at the time. They may have been in office a half-century ago, but the artificial discrepancies between their parties remain to this day.

Place yourself in the shoes of the member of a small fishing village in 1960s Indochina. A well-meaning American eight thousand miles away votes for Nixon (a man that will later wipe your community from the face of the earth) because of the candidate's proposal to give tax incentives to minority-owned businesses and housing; a noble idea but paid with your blood. Not even a decade before that, another well-meaning American eight thousand miles away votes for and then eulogizes Kennedy (a man that defied the Geneva Conventions by authorizing the use of the chemical weapon Agent Orange to begin a genocide of your people in name of self-defense) because of the candidate's calls for a peaceful and prosperous America for people of all colors; again a noble concept, with your scars as a receipt.

Given the trajectory of the last seventy-five years, the Republican and Democratic Party have long lost their mandate to govern and a vote for either party is willful ignorance as to how the machinery of government operates. This is not a statement of opinion. This is not some revolutionary or radical stance. This is the simple reality that exists outside the crumbling window that the trainer and their tortoises would rather not acknowledge.

When you vote, you’re granting legitimacy to the party and people you’re endorsing. In a democracy of any variation, there is no such thing as a ‘lesser of two evils.’ You can vote for Joe Biden or Donald Trump out of protest to the other, and a ‘win’ might feel good for about a week or two, but the political reality is that you’re elevating a group of people to a level where they possess dominion over three hundred million citizens and there exists very little recourse in holding them accountable. A ‘vote’ is not a statement of support or agreement; it is a certificate of irrevocable trust, one that Americans are woefully opulent in giving.

Due to our population size and surface area, we require a government centralized to a degree that both betrays the ‘individualism’ of our foundation and cannot possibly be filled competently; the citizenry see themselves as possessing autonomy over the political decisions of the nation while accepting no culpability for its faults. Had we put it to a direct vote in 2003, the United States would still have found itself mired in Middle Eastern warfare. Had Hilary Clinton been elected in 2016, the United States would still have a six-figure death count from COVID-19. The United States is fundamentally at odds with itself in regards to accepting the responsibilities and consequences for its identity in a way that only the Ottomans can relate to.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and we Americans have a very warped view of what constitutes ‘history’. Our nation isn’t even three hundred years old, so most of us may see anything occurring before the mid-1700s as so long ago that it isn’t even relevant to what we’re experiencing today. Wrong.

The Ottoman Empire was arguably the first nation in history to be both definitively multicultural and revered for its strong economic vitality. Sound familiar? For six hundred years it presided as the center of trade between the empires of Europe and Asia, occupying a vast territory now belonging to most of the Middle East, Northern Africa, and stretching all the way up into Central Europe. Imagine telling one of its citizens that in less than three generations it’d go from ‘experiencing some minor governmental inefficiencies’ to ‘so non-existent that most of the world will have forgotten it ever was.’

As an American, imagine being visited by a tourist from the future. “Oh, the United States? I think that sounds familiar....” While they sifted through their history book, imagine asking them just how many centuries they had traveled to reach 2020. “Almost two.” Only two hundred years? How could that be possible? Your grandchildren could still be alive at that point! Imagine asking them what you could do today to prevent this fate from befalling your homeland, what political action you could take to not only improve the present but ensure a future. “You can’t just untangle…well, let’s just say that the US doesn’t have a knot, you are the knot.”

In industrial sociology (how people interact with their working environments) there exists a phenomenon called the System Accident (or Normal Accident), where the unanticipated connection of multiple failures in a complex system cannot be slowed or stopped by any further interaction. Think of the Chernobyl disaster or the 2008 financial crisis; an inherent need is attached to a system that is overwhelmingly complex due to the efficiency/profit it can generate, to the point where multiple operators are required for it to function. Each of these operators may be incredibly competent in regards to their specific field, but the mechanism itself is nothing more than a series of dominos, where an operator can be only realistically be responsible for their single domino. If a single one manages to fall in an unexpected way and causes another domino to pivot in a way that cannot be predicted, there isn’t an operator that could possibly be so all-seeing as to prevent the entire chain from tumbling.

The federal government of the United States is experiencing a System Accident; the complexity of its governance, inherent at the founding and exacerbated for centuries, has rendered not only its citizens politically illiterate but its leaders as well when facing the multitude of existential threats that the country faces. Issues of education, the environment, immigration, economic inequality, and healthcare (among a plethora of others) have all reached critical mass, to such a degree that no one candidate or even series of successful candidates could possibly ‘solve’ them before one, some, most, or all aspects of American life collapse. ‘American Exceptionalism’ is real in that we are on the precipice of an exceptionally-elaborate demise; a noose tied with a Gordian knot that no drone strike can cut.

One can argue as to when the dominoes began falling, but the fact remains that the alarms are buzzing, the lights are flashing, and our elected operators are staring at their manuals, dumb-founded, “Maybe if we shove more votes into it?” And any attempts to reform the machine itself become paradoxical: installing an elected official into an apparatus where they, their family, and all of their peers benefit from the status quo and yet expecting them to follow through on their campaign promises is literally an exercise in insanity. But still, the cries of empty madness echo between the ears of those pushing you to the polling place, "You just gotta vote."

At some point in the life of an American voter they are faced with a conundrum: either the president is directly responsible for the trajectory of the country during their time in office or that the position has far little authority when compared to the overall inertia of 'American interests' and the figure serves as nothing more than a ceremonial scapegoat. A rational individual might conclude that the truth lies in the middle, but this inconvenience is too complicated for the voter to consider, as their political consciousness has been reduced to not only a binary mindset but a race to find the most pedantic, politically-expedient, and laziest opinions possible.

There isn’t a single American who whole-heartedly approves of our two-party system, yet nearly all calls for reforming the structure are woefully ignorant of the complexity of the knot they seek to untangle. You can implement Ranked Choice voting, you can abolish the Electoral College, and you can promote the existence of third parties but none of these will rectify the situation as long as the Senate exists. The highest legislative body in the country will always favor the two largest parties so long as membership to its ranks is limited too so few seats per state. You could possibly amend the Constitution to dissolve the Senate into the House of Representatives and give us a unicameral legislature (which would make it easier for a fascist party to take over, by the way) but how could such a proposal ever pass? What legislative body is going to pass a measure that restricts its own powers? And to abolish the Senate would require such a comprehensive rewriting of the Constitution that it (the document that our entire government is based on) would bear no resemblance to its former self:

We don’t have a knot, we are the knot; each new major-party president that you vote into the Oval Office is nudging the stool from under our feet.

Every Republican and Democratic president of the modern era (1945 - now) has put this country three steps forward at most, and four steps backward at least. The idea that change can only be implemented incrementally and four years at a time as being integral to the fabric of governance has doomed the country that was handed the literal world at its feet in the 1950s only to regress to its former state: a swath of lawyers, sharecroppers, and slaves convincing themselves that they are so much more enlightened than the rest of the world simply because they raise their hands twice a decade for a war criminal and slap a crude 'I Voted!' decal on their chest. "Do the people of China get a sticker like me? I think not! Feast your eyes on me, an intellectual, as confirmed by my shiny sticker!"

I was in Hong Kong in 2019 when the people stood up and said, "Enough. We’ve been voting for pro-Hong Kong candidates for two decades, but they can only exist in a legislature ultimately beholden to Beijing. Time to burn down the banks and take back our mandate." I was back in America by June of 2020, when the people realized, "Enough. Look how big the politicians' eyes get when we actually do something instead of pretending like the ballot will fix a four-hundred-year-old problem. Time to burn down the banks and find a mandate." I was incredibly proud to be an American in June of 2020. But now it is the fall, just before an election, and I look to my compatriots who have defanged and declawed themselves, tying the leash of their hopes and dreams around the first-past-the-post, "Well, you see, voting is actually the MOST important thing you can do to alter the trajectory of this country, as evident by all those wars, bail-outs, and other catastrophes that they never put on the ballot."

At this time in history, it's incredibly spoiled, selfish, and maniacal to behave as if the platform and values that you vote for aren’t paid for with others’ blood. Every single president in the last seventy-five years has waged war against civilian men, women, and children in places 'unfortunate-enough' not to be inside American borders, and yet each of these leaders still maintain some small cult of personality to this day. Loyal Republicans and Democrats sing their praises in regards to the virtuous deeds they've done for the American people while dismissing any light shone on the grotesque exploits they've rendered unto those 'unfortunate-enough' to not be born American. Look at the war crimes of Obama and Bush and the benign image these two men been rehabilitated toward; were it to happen in any other nation we'd refer to it as 'grooming' of the people and idolatry of the State, as if we didn't all grow up pledging allegiance to the flag of a government that not-so-subtly implied that our actions were an extension of God's will.

The Declaration of Independence's most famous phrase is in its opening, "We hold these truths to be self-evident"; though it is not a legal document, this statement does imply a fundamental position that the value of human life is integral to the foundation of our government, meaning that this right extends to any person, regardless of race, creed, religion, sex, and -especially- nationality. Imagine a perfect candidate that not only promises several wonderful improvements to the American way of life but can absolutely guarantee their implementation…though the only catch is that they will kill innocent civilians eight thousand miles away during their time in office. Considering that Donald Trump and Joe Biden have no such promises, with no avenue to actually pass anything through Congress, and are already both responsible for a multitude of deaths during their time in government, maybe take a moment to consider the ludicrous degree that one would have to abandon every form of ethics in order to punch the ballot for either of them and the audacity required to brow-beat others into accepting voting as an actual gesture of positive political change.

There is no Republican or Democratic platform that does not involve the unjustifiable deaths of citizens in countries too small to respond with a declaration of war, and there is no argument that an American life is worth more than another’s. You can vote for Donald Trump or Joe Biden, and claim that you're doing so "for human rights," but both candidates will respond to a softly-spoken briefing from Pentagon officials with the same answer: "Do it." And they won't think twice, because they've never lost votes over 'collateral damage'; Americans simply grab their self-righteous teddy bear named 'better than the other candidate' and doze off to sleep.

Osman Hamdi Bey painted The Tortoise Trainer not as a statement of pessimism or from a jaded outlook on the state of politics. The man was instrumental in helping the Ottoman Empire define itself through times of great change and strife, granting a sense of identity to a nation struggling to adapt to the global stage. But, by the end of his life, he saw the State of an empire for what it was: a machine which could weave strands of culture, economy, science, and diplomacy into a beautiful tapestry but instead chooses to fashion these threads into a noose which it is too arrogant to believe could ever be its own.

When filling out your ballot, in this or any year, begin at the very bottom. Your vote is most important for city, county, and state elections. But as you ascend the mostly-binary choices, understand that your actual voice diminishes with each new selection. And when that fateful day arrives and the winners are announced, understand that it is no great tragedy or triumph, as the sun will set no slower than it already is and that you have your specific tortoises to tend to before it gets dark. And, unlike those who promise to fix your crumbling walls yet can't seem to find the time between doomed wars, you can sleep at night knowing that you don’t whip your tortoises into submission ("Vote!") but educate them to perform by the art of the flute and nutrients of the vegetable; maybe someday an empire will rise which understands this, but it'd be the first. Vote, but don’t punch any holes large enough for your hopes and dreams to fit through, lest you once again hang yourself from the ballot.

Embracing the Stormy Sea-OVID-19

By:  Jesse Stewart, Staff Writer

Director Jesse Stewart and actor Sam Li on the set of a Chinese miniseries.

In March of last year, I was on a date with a model at a fancy Italian restaurant in Hong Kong. In March of this year, I was alone in my parents’ basement with a plate of chicken tenders. I ordered chicken tenders in Hong Kong as well, but that's not the point.

 To say that COVID-19 has upended the average life would be an understatement. Every nation has been brought to their knees, economies slowly sinking and people more unsure and insecure than they have been since the Second World War. Even those that love to plan and prioritize have found themselves look at not just the coming year with uncertainty but the coming week.

I am among those that had a 'good' life before the pandemic. For the first time in my career and far younger than expected, I was going to make six figures in 2020. I'm a filmmaker and the third 'big' project of my career was set to shoot in the summer. I was a bit ambitious as well, planning to take those six figures and use them to shoot my debut feature film, with the goal of having it ready for festivals in 2021. In reality, through no fault of my own, I had lost thousands of dollars by the end of Spring and my industry wasn't even sure how it could possibly exist in the current state of the world. Sure, the quarantined masses need entertainment, but how are projects supposed to be funded when no one has any money? If actors need to stay six feet apart, how are we supposed to shoot that romantic scene where they share chicken tenders?

 My initial reaction to the pandemic was somewhat average. I had a part-time job that immediately shuttered because it was based on theatre, opera, and symphony patrons, an entire demographic that has temporarily ceased to exist. I used the free time to finish a screenplay or two as well as indulge in what will likely become one of the most significant media releases in history, the video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Focusing on my inner creativity as well as my digital bonsai tree was beneficial: like many, I would argue that I 'grew' as a person through this isolation and seclusion.

 I had the benefit of staying with my parents at the time, but I own a small business: though my rent was now significantly cheaper, it's not like my bills stayed six feet away. My business partners and I looked at options for 'COVID-proof' film concepts, but it's very difficult to draw up battle plans for a large group effort when the legalities of basic congregation are in flux almost daily.

 By the end of June, I had imploded. There's only so much 'character development' and 'internal growth' one can undergo before weakening your sense of self to the point of collapse. Flurry, the winter-themed hamster who lives on my Animal Crossing island, may be the sweetest being in existence, but she doesn't actually exist. They may be quick and tasty, especially with a bottle of orange sauce from Panda Express, but I can only eat so many chicken tenders. I am a modest and frugal man, but even I have my limits.

 When faced with a massive difficulty in life, or even a multitude of minor troubles that coalesce into a solid mass of problems, there are really only two options. One can simply stop, resign themselves, and sink into the abyss, choosing to see the present condition as insurmountable. Or one can strategize. I grew up reading a lot of military books, learning tactics and maneuvers; it's simply a matter of physics in saying that there are only four options when faced with an opposing force in your path: you can go over, under, around, or through that which is antagonizing you.

 In quarantine, I had inadvertently grown to be much more complacent than I usually am. I think I rationalized this at the time as a 'strategic retreat’: I would save as much money as I could, by living with my parents, in order to ensure that I could help finance my feature film. I would work on myself, striving for self-improvement with free time I didn't have before. And I would 'relax,' by playing a video game for the first time in a long time. But the problem was that each of these little endeavors had no metric for progression or advancement, as there was no external force by which to measure them against.

 COVID-19 is not an opposing obstacle in anyone's path: it's a state of reality. In the same way one wouldn't lament the fact that they can't breathe underwater, one must accept that there is a respiratory disease that spreads through close-contact infection and can't simply be 'willed' out of existence. COVID-19 is not a stone in your path, it's the uneven stones upon it. The terrain of life has changed, your tactics should change along with it.

 By the start of July, I surveyed the peaks and valleys of 2020, those rolling hills that I didn't expect when I crested the New Year back in January. Filming anything this year seemed to be a foolish proposition, but remaining slow and reserved until conditions improved was clearly not giving me enough momentum and causing me to sink. John A. Shedd once said, "A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for"; the peaks and valleys of 2020 aren't as solid as land, we're faced with the rolling waves of an unsure sea.

 So, I set out to find, inscribe, and place distinct milestones to place on my path. The film industry is often a 'wait-and-see' business, where one hands off the baton and waits for their colleagues to return it after running their lap, so chopping my own entirely-individual trail was something I hadn't done in a while. It's definitely odd to cut a path only wide enough for one.

 Though I couldn't quite afford it in these unsure times, I found a great apartment in Denver. Not as great as my apartment in Beijing, but I learned to humble my expectations and have now fallen in love with my home. I hadn't done manual labor in years, but I found a part time job loading shipping boxes into the back of shipping trucks so they can be shipped to the coast and into shipping ships. Each day is tough, dirty, and tiring, but I sleep like a baby. And I returned to college to finish my degree, after quite a long sabbatical, having left to pursue my career; a decision that paid off until a force of nature ground the entire globe to a complete halt. Like Mike Tyson said, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face."

 The benefit of COVID-19 directly punching the lives of just about every human being on the face of the planet, arguably making it the most significant event in history since the Ice Age, is the psychological advantage of knowing that one is absolutely not alone in this crisis. The event may be unprecedented, but there are far too many people affected by this for any one situation to be entirely exclusive to just one person. Whatever you're struggling with or whatever discomforts you face, there are thousands if not millions of others who are just as unsure, uncertain, unstable, uneasy, and unprepared for tomorrow as you might be.

 I look around the campus at Regis University and it feels like an alternate reality to me; I didn't have the money to go to college when I graduated high school, regardless of how badly I wanted to go. Never in a million years would I have dreamed that I'd have a beautiful academic refuge and be surrounded by such bright young peers. I specify 'young' because I'm a little bit older than most students, still in my twenties but only just, while they're all so bubbly, smiley, and taking this crisis in stride. I'm happy to see they're facing this seemingly-ceaselessly-stormy sea with open sails.

 Three years ago, my feet climbed on the ancient bricks of the Great Wall. Two years ago, they drooped over the mossy canals quartering the streets of Amsterdam. Last year, they dangled over the waters of Victoria Harbour as Hong Kong struggled over who they wanted to be. This year, well, the rug having been pulled out from under me; I’ve no choice but be head over heels about being up in the air and excited to see where my feet may land next. In the meantime, maybe I'll get lucky with the in-flight meal, “Flurry! They’re rolling out the chicken tenders!"