Week 2 Story: Ainsley and Deryn

There was once a young nerd named Ainsley. Like many young nerds, she loved nothing more than playing Dungeons and Dragons, and like most Dungeons and Dragons players, she became very attached to the characters she created. One character in particular was her favorite, a wizard named Deryn. Ainsley spent more time creating Deryn than she had spent on any other character- she would write stories about her life, draw pictures of her, and she even made a Deryn costume to wear to Dungeons and Dragons sessions. Her friends all thought she was too obsessed with Deryn, but Ainsley just wanted her to be a real person.

As the months went on, Ainsley felt more and more like Deryn was the missing piece in her life. She started writing letters to Deryn, which she left in a basket over her fireplace, and she’d talk to Deryn as if she was in the room- when her friends expressed concern about her habit of talking to someone who not only wasn’t there, but wasn’t even real, Ainsley merely said that she knows Deryn isn’t real, and refused to discuss it further.

On Valentine’s Day, Ainsley’s Dungeons and Dragons group met for a party. They ate dinner and roasted marshmallows in the fireplace, and eventually their discussion got around to talking about their significant others. Everyone lamented how hard it was to convince their partners that they should go to a Dungeons and Dragons session on Valentine’s instead of going on a date- but when it was Ainsley’s turn to talk, she merely said that she was disappointed that Deryn couldn’t be there. That was the end of the line for one of her friends, and he got up, grabbed the letters off the mantle, and, despite Ainsley’s vehement protests, threw them into the fire. Ainsley, devastated, ordered everyone to leave, and she laid down next to the fireplace and cried over losing everything she had of Deryn. She cried and cried and cried, until she fell asleep.

Ainsley awoke to sunlight streaming through the windows. It was the next morning; the fire had died down, the letters turned completely to ash. And then she heard a voice behind her, a voice she had only imagined before.

“It’s about time you woke up. I’ve been waiting for hours.”

Ainsley turned slowly, hardly daring to hope that it could be true. Sitting on the couch was another young woman, black-clad and blue-haired, with a dagger strapped to her waist and a glowing staff lying on the coffee table.

“D-Deryn? Is it really you?”

Deryn laughed. “Of course it’s me, silly. You didn’t think I’d stay in those letters forever, did you? God, what a boring life. Come over here, have a seat. You’ve spent so long talking to me, I want to talk to you now.” Ainsley walked over to the couch and sat down next to Deryn.

And they lived happily ever after.

Burning letter. Source

Author’s note:

This week, I adapted the ancient story of Pygmalion to a more modern setting. Very few people sculpt these days, but a lot of people play Dungeons and Dragons, and, as a D&D player myself, I can attest to the fact that many people become far too attached to their characters. I also changed the main character from a man to a woman; we have so many stories about man-woman couples in mythology, and comparatively few stories about couples where both members are the same gender, and I felt like there should be more. I also gave the created woman a name, as the woman in Pygmalion didn’t have a name, and she seemed depersonalized because of it (the name Deryn comes from Welsh, and means bird). I kept the symbolism of a burnt offering and a festival of love from the original story.

Bibliography: Ovid's Metamorphoses, translated by Tony Kline (2000). Source

Reading notes: Week 2

Origin Stories

The Man in the Moon (Laos) (Laos Folk-Lore by Katherine Neville Fleeson)

Blacksmith can't make up his mind. Asks to be a stone, a stone cutter, the sun, and ends up stuck as the moon.

The Hare that was not Afraid to Die (Buddhist) (Eastern Stories and Legends by Marie L. Shedlock (1920))

Before he was born as a human, the Buddha was a rabbit. Monkey, Jackal, and Otter are his friends.

Buddha tells his friends to fast and give food to beggars. Otter and Jackal steal food, but do not eat it. Monkey picks mangoes, but doesn't eat them. Buddha decides to allow anyone who asks for food to eat him. 

Sakka, the King of Gods, disguises himself and tests the Buddha. Buddha responds to his request for food by telling him to build a fire. Buddha then jumps into the fire, which he discovers to be an illusion. Sakka is impressed by the Buddha's willingness to die, and paints the Buddha's likeness on the moon to commemorate it.

The Hare in the Moon Source

The Divine

The Eight-Forked Serpent of Koshi (Japan) (Romance of Old Japan, Part I: Mythology and Legend by E. W. Champney and F. Champney (1917))

Susa-no-wo sees chopstick in the river, follows the river upstream to find the people who used it. He finds an elderly couple and a young woman. Old man introduces the group as Ashinadzuchi (him), Tenadzuchi (his wife), and Kushinada-hime (their daughter). They are sad because an eight-headed monster has eaten their eight daughters, and will be back soon to eat Kushinada-hime. He says the monster is as big as eight valleys and eight mountains. Susa-no-wo offers to kill the monster in exchange for getting Kushinada-hime's hand in marriage. Ashinadzuchi is hesitant, so Susa-no-wo says he is the brother of the goddess Amaterasu. Ashinadzuchi consents to the arrangement.

Susa-no-wo turns Kushinada-hime into a hair comb. He asks Tenadzuchi to make a batch of sake of eightfold strength while be builds a structure with eight doors. Behind each door, he places a vat full of the sake. He then waits for the monster, which eventually arrives and gets drunk on the sake, which causes it to fall asleep. Susa-no-wo draws his sword and cuts the monster into a thousand pieces. Inside the tail of the monster, he finds a magical sword, which he delivers to the God of Heaven. He then marries Kushinada-hime.

The Supernatural

The Indian who Wrestled with a Ghost (from the Teton Lakota) (Myths and Legends of the Great Plains by Katharine Berry Judson (1913))

A man is walking through the woods when he meets an owl. He falls asleep at the edge of the forest and wakes up to a woman screaming about her son. He lies still, watching through a hole in his blanket as the woman arrives at his camp. He plays dead as she tries to wake him, but when she pulls out a knife and tries to cut his foot, he jumps up and yells at her. She runs away. He lies back down and doesn't sleep.

In the morning, he sees a burial scaffold and thinks the woman was the ghost from the scaffold.

The next night, he makes camp by another forest. A traveler comes by and asks the man for some food. After he eats it, the man realizes that the traveler is in fact a skeleton. The skeleton challenges the man to wrestle, promising that, if the man wins, he will defeat his enemy and steal horses. The man builds up his fire before starting the wrestling. The skeleton becomes weak near the fire, and the man finally wins by pushing him into the fire as the sun rises. The skeleton's promise comes true, and the man defeats his enemy and steals some horses.

Metamorphosis

Pygmalion (Ancient Greece) (Ovid's Metamorphoses, translated by Tony Kline (2000))

Pygmalion sculpts a woman, who he falls in love with. He brings it presents and cuddles it. On Venus's festival day, he prays to her and wishes that his could have his ivory girl as a bride. He comes home and, when he touches the statue, she turns into a real woman. The two get married and have a child.

Tricksters

The Tiger, the Brahman, and the Jackal (India) (Indian Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs with illustrations by John D. Batten (1912))

A tiger is trapped in a cage. He asks a passing Brahman to let him out, promising not to eat him afterward. When the tiger is let out of the cage, he goes against his word and tries to eat the Brahman. After much pleading from the Brahman, the tiger agrees to not eat him if the first three things the Brahman asks take the Brahman's side.

First, the Brahman asks a pipal-tree, which has no sympathy and tells him to "be a man". He then finds a buffalo turning a well-wheel, who tells the Brahman that he was a fool to expect gratitude. He finally asks the road he stands on, and the road laments that it is useful to everyone and yet gets no thanks, and it thus has no sympathy for the Brahman.

The Brahman runs into a jackal as he walks back to the tiger, who asks to hear the story. The Brahman retells it several times, and the jackal repeatedly claims to have not heard the story, could the Brahman please tell it again? The Brahman eventually takes the jackal back with him to the tiger, and asks the tiger to allow him to tell the jackal the story just one more time. The tiger agrees, and the Brahman tells the story again, drawing it out as long as he can. The jackal once again pretend to be confused, asking the tiger how he got in the cage. The jackal pretends not to understand, and the tiger, fed up, jumps back into the cage. The jackal shuts the door, once again trapping the tiger in the cage again.

Fables

The Lion (Aesop) (The Fables of Aesop by Joseph Jacobs (1894))

The Lion's Share

The Lion, the Jackal, the Fox, and the Wolf go hunting together, and manage to kill a stag. The Lion tells the other three to quarter it, and then claims all four parts for various reasons. The fox is irritated.

Androcles and the Lion

Androcles, a slave, flees into the forest, where he finds an injured lion. The lion has a large thorn in its paw. Androcles removes the thorn, and the lion takes Androcles back to his cave and brings him food. The two are recaptured, and Androcles is sentenced to be fed to the lion. The lion, though starving, doesn't attack Androcles, but merely licks his hand. Androcles explains the story to the Emperor, who lets both Androcles and the lion go free. (Note: Lions don't live in the forest)

The Lion and the Statue

A Lion claims that a man cannot use a statue as proof that humans are stronger than lions, because a human made the statue.

The Lion in Love

A lion proposes to a young woman. Her parents say the lion needs to be de-clawed and have his teeth removed first. He does this, but the parents once again tell him no, and tell him to do his worst.

Fairy Tale

The Three Roses (Czech) (The Key of Gold by Josef Baudis (1922))

A mother goes to market with shopping lists from her three daughters. Two of them ask for many things; the third asks for three roses. She gets lost on the way home and happens upon a palace, where she picks three roses for her daughter. After picking the roses, she is confronted by a basilisk, who demands her daughter in exchange for the roses. The mother arrives home and tells her daughter, who agrees to the basilisk's demands and goes to the castle.

After arriving at the castle, the basilisk demands that the girl nurse him every day. On the third day, he brings a sword and tells her to cut his head off. She resists, but he insists, and she does, releasing a serpent. The serpent asks for her to cut its head off as well, which she does, and the serpent changes into a young man, who then marries her.

Reading Options

I have a few directions I am interested in going with my readings. I'm very interested in Celtic mythology, specifically regarding Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, but there seems to be very little in the UnTextbook regarding Celtic mythology. There is a fairly robust collection of fairy tales form the British Isles, though, which I could also work with. I'm also interested in the stories of the Pacific Northwest; I grew up in Oregon, and I heard a lot of the Native American stories from the region when I was little, so I'm interested in reading more about those and seeing how they compare to what I remember. Additionally, I'm curious about the mythology surrounding ravens and crows. They have roles in mythologies from all over the world, and it's interesting to see the similarities and differences in how they're represented in different cultures.

Pacific Northwest
Stories from the Native tribes of the Pacific Northwest, including three stories about Raven.

Celtic Fairytales
Fairytales from the British Isles, most of which I've never read before.

Welsh Fairytales
Fairytales from Wales, featuring a story called "Crows" which is, predictably, about crows.

A raven walking on snow Source

Time Management

I read The Important Habit of Just Starting and How to Beat Procrastination. I think that, for some people, these articles might be legitimately helpful, but they address a type of procrastinating that is fundamentally different than the way I procrastinate. I've always had trouble getting work done ahead of time- for example, freshman year, I had an 8 page term paper. I had three months to write this paper. I wrote it the night before it was due. But the problem wasn't that I had kept putting it off- I had scheduled time into my schedule every week to go to the library and work on it. Every week, I went to the library and tried to write, and every week, I read a bunch of articles from the journals we were supposed to be getting our research from- usually starting with articles that were relevant to my paper, but always getting distracted and reading things that had no relevance to my paper. I finally figured out that the library was the problem, and started working in places where I couldn't possibly get sucked into an article. But I could never manage to focus on the paper. I ended up having about half a page written when I sat down to write the rest of it the night before it was due (a very bad half a page, at that). I finished the paper that night, very easily, and I got 100% on it. This cycle repeats itself every term- I have a long paper to write, I try and try to get it done ahead of time, but I just can't focus on it until the night before it's due, when I "hyperfocus" (for lack of a better term) and finish the whole thing in a few hours. I know it's a problem, but every strategy I've tried to fix it is ineffective. I've tried joining study groups in my classes, which just results in me being more distracted during my writing time, and I've tried setting myself earlier deadlines, like "I have to have half the paper finished by March 4", which invariably results in one of three things- I write the first half of the paper the night of March 3, I write the entire paper the night of March 3, or my brain says "that's not really a due date", and I write the paper the night before it's actually due. Last term, I literally read two entire books and wrote a five page paper about them in one night. I had had the books for weeks, and I'd tried to read them every single day, but I could never focus right. So, that's my biggest time management challenge, I think, but in a way, I do have a time management method that works well for me- I've never gotten a grade that wasn't an A on one of my rushed papers. It's just a very stressful and bad method.

Editing: a step I rarely have time to do Source

Technology

I feel like I'm familiar with all of the technology skills we need for this class. I've run a Tumblr blog for years, and I used to have a (very bad) website about vampires hosted on one of the free website hosting platforms. I use Bookmarks almost every day, and I've used Paint, GIMP, and Photoshop for image editing (I've also used Word and PowerPoint for basic image editing; they aren't great by any means, but they work in a pinch for resizing and basic color adjustment). The only thing I haven't done is graphics creation, but I just looked up a few, and they seem pretty simple to use.
The major way this class differs from other online classes I've taken is that all of the content is hosted off of the main class platform. I kind of like it, because Canvas can be a hassle sometimes (mostly because teachers put things in strange places that you'd never expect to find them, but also because it has a tendency to load really slowly on my computer), but it was also kind of confusing at first.

Very accurate. Made with AutoMotivator using a personal photo

Assignments

There are some assignments that I'm very excited about, and others that I'm not super excited for. I'm really looking forward to the reading assignments, and I'm excited to get to write stories as well. I'm not terribly excited for the commenting- I always get nervous when I have to comment on other people's work, and I know this won't be any different.
This is actually a lot like what I did in the other online classes I've taken. I did a whole year of online school in high school, and it was pretty similar to this in many of my classes. Students would do readings, and then we'd usually post in the "discussions" section of the class, and then leave a comment on one to three other students' discussion posts. The creation of a term-long project is also something I have experience with. I have had several classes (mostly English, but also a History class and a "Freshman Experience" class) where we had to make a semester portfolio. One of those portfolios involved writing a series of stories about a fictional alien species. We had to create the species, their customs and traditions, and design a myth system that they followed.

Books by Abhi Sharma on Flickr Source

Growth Mindset

Before today, I had seen the RSA Animate video. I didn't remember much about it, but what I did remember was the incredible irony that we watched the video in a class at high school that, like most high school classes, was graded based on success, not effort. Our teacher praised that video for the entire class period, then turned around and openly shamed students who had gotten low scores on our homework that week. It seemed incredibly hypocritical to me that we watched this video all about how people who aren't doing so great can and should try and can eventually improve their abilities, yet during the same class, students who tried incredibly hard were publicly humiliated in front of all their classmates, while students who didn't try at all (in this case, me) were praised simply for getting high scores.
As a result of this experience, I have some issues with the growth mindset concept. On it's own, I think it's a great idea- people should be encouraged to try again if they can't complete a task or understand a concept on the first try. However, it clashes horribly with the American educational system, which, as several of the articles and videos mentioned or alluded to, rewards immediate success and seems to almost discourage trying, because no matter how good you eventually get at whatever it is you're practicing, you'll always be compared to the person who succeeded on their first attempt, because "if only you could be as good as them". This educational system also pumps out an endless stream of young adults who crave instant gratification- many of my classmates freshman year, for example, were so used to succeeding at everything on the first try that, when they "failed" on an assignment in college (not always even an actual failure- I saw a student in tears over getting a B on a quiz), they immediately gave up and stopped trying in that class, because, in their minds, they're obviously not good at it. If we remade our educational system from the ground up to reward effort as well as success, the growth mindset would be very applicable. However, in its current state, the two are mostly incompatible, in my opinion.
At the level of education I'm at (the second half of a bachelor's degree, taking mostly upper division classes), the growth mindset is applicable to about half of classes. In this class, where there are a lot of assignments, you have a chance to put in effort and improve over time. In other classes, however, your grade might be based on one paper, or a paper and an exam, or, worst of all, just one exam. In these classes, there's really no space to apply the growth mindset, because, when your abilities are assessed only once over the course of a term, you have no opportunity to show growth. In this class, I hope to be able to apply the growth mindset to my work. I know I won't do amazingly on my first few assignments, but I can keep trying and getting better throughout the term.

 This cat reminds me of when I try to play an instrument- one of my favorite hobbies, which I'm very bad at. Source

Introduction to Raven

Hi everyone!
My name is Raven. I'm a sophomore Human Health and Biology (Anthropology) and Biology major and a German minor at OU (yeah, it's a lot). I get to take some awesome classes for my majors! In Spring 2017, I took an honors research class about the navigation of scorpions, and my team published a paper about our research in the Journal of Arachnology just this month! This semester, I'm taking another honors research class, this time about forensic entomology. It's also really fun!
I also get to take some really fun anthropology classes. Last term, I took a class about the evolution of primates, and we got to go to the zoo and watch lots of videos about monkeys and lemurs. I loved it.

The mouse lemur. Indisputably the cutest primate. Source

Outside of classes, I have a few hobbies. I love going to concerts. I went to two concerts this summer- Warped Tour 2018, which is a traveling pop-punk festival, and Panic! at the Disco- and I'm planning on going to see my all time favorite band, All Time Low, in Dallas in October (I saw them and got to meet them last summer, so I'm really excited to see them again).

This is my favorite All Time Low song! Source: YouTube

I also really like reading books- my favorite books are the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, the Shadowhunter Chronicles by Cassandra Clare, and pretty much anything about historical crimes- and playing instruments- I play violin pretty well, flute passably, and piano, bass, and mandolin badly (though I can play most of the big All Time Low songs on mandolin. Badly, but its still something). I love playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends, too- I especially like playing characters that play instruments, so I have an excuse to break out my mandolin skills. Related to D&D, I really love making and wearing fantasy medieval costumes- mostly for the medieval fair, but also sometimes for just wearing to D&D. 

I have one pet, my cat Schrödinger. She likes sleeping, eating, and climbing trees. She also likes hunting birds, but she's really, really bad at it. She lives with my mom in Washington, so I don't get to see her much, but she's the best cat in the world.

Storybook Favorites

Huntresses of Artemis: How to Join and Immortal Girl Gang
This storybook project covers a topic that I consider myself fairly familiar with, the story of the Greek goddess Artemis, goddess of the hunt, and her followers, a hunting group of immortal young women. However, this retelling of the Artemis myths was unique for several reasons, most notably that it incorporated characters from not just Greek myths, but also Sumerian and Indian myths. I felt like the introduction did a good job of describing, in loose terms, what the general topic of the stories would be, while still leaving room for surprises and deviations form the original myths. I also enjoyed how the stories incorporated Artemis interacting with characters from other belief systems; although it might not be mythologically accurate, I thought it was interesting to see how the different myth systems meshed.

Selkie Tales
This storybook project covers a topic that I'm less familiar with than the Greek myths. Although I am interested in Scottish mythology and have a passing knowledge of selkies and other creatures from the mythology, I don't have nearly the in-depth knowledge that I have of the Greek myths. I liked the frame story that was used for this storybook, of a mother selkie telling her daughter stories of their own kind. I liked the inclusion of a linked song on the introduction and in the last story; I felt like the songs added to the atmosphere of the story, and I might consider including something similar in my own project.

In the Seven Woods
This storybook took a different approach than the other two, using four stories compiled by one author, rather than stories from various sources, and combining all the stories to make one long story about the same characters. As with the Selkie Tales, I have only a passing familiarity with the myths in this storybook; I have more knowledge of Irish mythology and the associated creatures than I do Scottish, but I can't say I have any real familiarity with the specific characters, besides a handful of gods that I can recognize by name. I liked the frame of combining all of the stories into one narrative; however, I felt like using stories all from one source was a little less creative than the other storybooks, which pulled from different sources and even different myth systems.

Queen Maeve, one of the characters in In the Seven Woods

Favorite Place: Portland

Portland, Oregon
I lived in a lot of places growing up, but I always loved going back to Oregon, where I was born and where I lived until I was 8. I wasn't able to go to college in Oregon, due to the price, but I got lucky- after I started college here in Oklahoma, my mom moved to Vancouver, Washington, right across the border from Portland. Now, whenever I visit my mom, I get a chance to go to Portland. I love visiting the different hipster neighborhoods- all the coffee shops and the little vintage stores are so fun to visit- and it's just a great place overall. I love the people, the food, and the weather, and it's my favorite place to spend time.

Old Town Portland sign

Image source: goodfreephotos

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