hilarious how grace is wandering around that aircraft carrier thinking i'm just a guy. meanwhile his security clearance is technically on the same level as the actual eva stratt herself
#phm#in the book he's like#'my office is technically a storage closet. they're gonna kick me out of here when we resupply. i'm about as important as toilet paper.'#man you live on a boat. how many other people on the boat have an office at all.#you're the guy who looks at the paperwork and signs shit that's not worth bothering stratt over#which you can choose to interpret as either not very important or VERY IMPORTANT INDEED.#you're the guy who says 'yeah i think this plan is scientifically feasible'#to which stratt says 'okay my pet scientist says it'll work‚ let's go ahead and pave the sahara.'
Important update: it has been several weeks and little mans still needs to inspect and rub his face on the shower head every single night before bed so after washing up and putting on my jimjams I then have to get up on a stool like
"Grace Ryland is Rocky's dog" is such a funny fucking dynamic when you think about it
Eridians are further behind than humans technologically right? They dont have computers, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. In fact, Eridians probably dont even know about the Big Bang because their atmosphere would filter out most of the cosmic microwave background radiation we use to detect it. On a human timeline, theyre anywhere between like early-mid 20th century. Rocky's basically a cosmonaut.
So the human civilization is pretty advanced from Rocky's perspective. Rationally he understands this. On a conceptual level he knows this to be true.
But at the same time... imagine youre one of the first ever cosmonauts to make it into space. Then you meet a 10 year old alien dog who cant do 2+2 without pulling out its calculator. It forgets everything constantly and has to keep notes everywhere, like it basically lives in Memento (2000). Also if it doesnt nap constantly it gets even stupider. And you somehow has to reconcile this with the fact that this dog has a better understanding of physics than your entire civilization does. Like the dog knows how the universe started.
This isnt better from Grace's perspective btw. Eridians never developed computers, so all their ship systems are steered using basically the manual labor of 24 Eridians. Also theres no radiation shielding on their ship. Actually im pretty sure half the reason why Rocky is always busy fixing shit is because the radiation keeps frying all the onboard electronics, so hes always building and fixing and replacing components
Like imagine being a modern day sailor navigating the Pacific with GPS and strong hulls to protect against the raging ocean. And from portside you see like an honest to god viking ship. Except its made of some high tech carbon fiber material. But like, its still very definitely a viking ship. You can clearly see there's 24 oars along the hull where sailors are supposed to use to manually row their ship. Also the ship is leaking and theres like one little dude on board whos skittering around patching the holes constantly. Also this little dude is blind and doesnt know about water. Thats how insane Eridians look being an interstellar species without computers or radiation shielding.
Both of them thinks the other one is the completely ridiculous and absurd one and theyre both totally amazed at how far the other has come in spite of it
That's because he didn't write, nor intend to write, a horrible terrible disturbed woman beyond redemption. The genesis of Carrie (told in its entirety in the 1999 edition's introduction that you can read here, and in King's memoir On Writing), was this: sometime in high school, King read an article in Life magazine about supposed poltergeist activity in a home, which seemed to be associated with the teenage girl who lived there. The article included the hypothesis that poltergeist activity is, in some way, tapped into or manifested by girls at that critical and tumultuous age.
And some years before that, King had gone to school with a couple of girls he pseudonymously calls Tina and Sandra, who were bullied and shunned by the other kids—Tina for wearing the same clothes every day, Sandra for her epilepsy and extremely religious mother, but both really for having some undefinable Other quality that kids pick up on like blood in the water. Both of them were dead by the time King began writing Carrie: Tina by suicide, Sandra from her epilepsy.
Carrie was what King imagined might have happened if that explanation of poltergeist activity were correct, and if Tina and Sandra had been able to tap into such an energy. He started writing the story a few years after getting married (his wife Tabitha is also a writer), but abandoned the idea a few pages in; the raw, merciless adolescent cruelty the story called for was too much to deal with, and what did he know about teenage girls, anyway? But Tabitha dug the pages out of the trash and read them, and convinced him it was a story that needed telling.
Carrie is a story which, perhaps like poltergeist activity, could only happen to a girl on the brink of womanhood, when every emotion and sensation is excruciatingly vivid and nothing makes sense anymore and every single occurrence in your life is the most important thing that will ever happen to you. It's about being horribly powerful and vulnerable at the same time, and alienated from your own body. It's about the visceral, starved animal fear and rage of being a teenage girl, and it goes to show what an arcane and powerful craft creative writing is that a man could manage to capture that without having experienced it firsthand.
"Sometimes—quite often, in fact—I wish that Tina and Sandy were alive to read it," King says in the 1999 introduction to Carrie. "Or their daughters."
okay so, guy at work, who i find out afterwards is famous at this place for being a sex pest, comes up and starts with what i also learn is his favorite opener to conversations where he’s going to be a sex pest, namely: “Do you know where the term ‘blow job’ comes from?”
and here he made his first fatal error. his moment of hubristic sex pesting. because of course i know where the term blow job comes from, i love learning about sex and the history of sexual terms! i know so much about oral sex that i could write a book on it!
his second error: approaching a little autistic freak with what he intended to be an uncomfortable sex question that would make me feel weird and gross. Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I Have Never Misjudged A Man’s Intentions So Incredibly In My Life. because i did not realize he was trying to harass me. because i love talking about sex facts, albeit not usually at work. unless. someone prompts me. my coworkers are the kind of people who are generally online enough to know terms, but not exactly what they mean, and they realized they could ask me a while back and get good answers without the resulting awkwardness because i do not experience shame. i am primed to answer questions like the one he has proposed.
So I Answered It.
and well, really, what happened is that I began answering it, then realized the answer required a bit more context. I mean, you can’t just say “oh, well, the term first appears in writing in the 1940s” without first explaining that ‘blow’ by itself already had sexual connotations for centuries, and then, really, are we talking about the origin of the term or the origin of the act. and well we have a ton of literature and art depicting fellatio throughout human history, did you know a lot of it was men performing it on other men? oh, that reminds me, there are a multitude of latin words for oral sex performed on penises, and hold on let me quote you the entirety of catullus 16 from memory and explain it’s fascinating insights into the roman world of homosexuality-
i do not know how to turn any of this ^ off, by the way. i’m sure some people out there have a switch that disables their infodumping mid-speech. i do not. and i also didn’t realize he wasn’t looking for a real answer until my other coworker explained so hours later. he could not excuse himself from the conversation he started, and i made a conservative man at least 30 years older than me to listen to my catullus recitation. i will sodomize and facefuck you, indeed.
anyway, i think i got a bad grade in being sexually harassed. my pro tip is maybe don’t start with what a very autistic individual will misconstrue as you earnestly asking them to explain sex to you. the special interest shield will cause splashback damage.
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