Mara Morales
November 09, 2020 1:01 PM
Showing appreciation (tag Bertie) by Mara Morales
There was nothing quite like the delicious feeling of curling up on her bed at home, books and notebooks before her, preparing to begin reading about a new thing. Mara had thoroughly enjoyed getting to do this with, among other things, the materials that Bertie Jackson had sent her over the summer. She had read everything at least twice, taking notes on the contents and writing down titles from the lists of sources referenced, and she had gotten some sense of directions which the topic could take her and which ones she found especially interesting.That had been the easy part. The hard part was…well, there was some question of what the ‘hard part’ even entailed.
One option was the language issue. Most of the stuff relevant, at least, to her own background which seemed to exist was written in Spanish. Mara could read Spanish – she had made a point of learning to do so – but she didn’t read it nearly as well as she read English. That frustrated her, not least because she didn’t think it made any sense (it was the same thing, just written down! Sure, the punctuation was a little different and there were some letters that didn’t work in English, but the alphabets were overwhelmingly similar!), but the fact remained, it took her longer to get through anything more sophisticated than, like, basic chapter books in Spanish than it did in English. It was doable, reading with a dictionary beside her, but it was annoying and made her vaguely want to kick people. If she wanted to look at primary sources, though, the language issue became downright impossible: when she had looked in the encyclopedias, it turned it out that the commonest indigenous languages in Colombia had all been virtually extinguished by the eighteenth century. There were a couple that survived into the present day, one of which even had a basic sort of writing system that might or might not (the text had not been sure) have existed before the Spanish arrived – but Mara had no idea if she could righly claim any sort of connection to that group, and it was possible that there had been no written languages at all pre-Conquest.
That led neatly enough to the second issue. There wasn’t even much left to know about pre-Conquest Colombia, except that it had seemed to consist mostly of smaller chiefdoms with sharp geographic divides, that these tribes had been sedentary farmers, and that they’d had multiple religions – the encyclopedia had talked about one that had been considered sophisticated and well-developed and had had a lot of rules about morals as they related to personal property, but then there had been another that might or might not have been into ritual cannibalism. So that was fun. Not half as fun, though, as the fact that they even knew most of that little bit they knew through the writings of priests who’d hung out with conquistadors, which were inherently somewhat untrustworthy. Mara had more recent connections to her ancestry, of course – her mother had grown up there – but her mother had proven most unhelpful. Mamá did not know anything about all that, and said that if it had been impressive enough to bother learning about, the Spanish wizards doubtless would have incorporated it into their system, as Europeans generally had incorporated American foods after the Colombian Exchange. Therefore, Mara was acting like a ‘stupid young person’ and needed to quit that before her mother knocked her upside the head with the broom. There was also the issue of her family not being into magic, of that being something she probably got from the White side of her family; she had managed, with some effort, to have a chat with her grandmother, but all Abuela knew were folk tales, really, which doubtless suffered the consequences of being filtered through both the Statute of Secrecy and, well, the conquistadors. So that had been a dead end.
All this, of course, had just annoyed her, and when she was annoyed, she usually doubled down. She had done so in this case; it had seemed bizarre that an actual human would write back and say anything useful when she had taken a magic bookseller’s catalogue up on its offer to write the shop if one wanted to know what there was on a given topic, but she had taken the chance and it had actually worked. That was how she had ended up wading through several books in Spanish.
Coming back to Sonora, she hoped she now knew enough to know what to look for while searching the library here for anything useful – last year, she had figured out pretty fast that part of the problem was not even knowing where to start. First, though, she had business she thought she ought to address.
“Oh, hey,” she said, spotting Bertie one day in the library. “Just wanted to say thanks again for the stuff, you know, this summer. It was helpful. I wanted to send you some back out of what I found from there, but I don’t know if you can read Spanish.” She strongly doubted someone named Bertram Jackson could read Spanish, but she didn’t know this for sure. Jessica Hayles was an odd name for someone who had actually learned to read Spanish properly in school, after all, and yet Jezi did it. Plus, ‘Bertram’ was a pretty posh-sounding name, so maybe he’d had a posh education before Sonora and could read six or seven languages, for all she knew. It seemed safer to ask than to assume either way. “You can borrow some now, though, if you do,” she added.
OOC: Information included drawn from the Encyclopedia Britannica, all rewritten in my/Mara's own words.
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Mara Morales
Showing appreciation (tag Bertie)
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Bertie Jackson
November 10, 2020 4:59 AM
You're pretty- welcome. by Bertie Jackson
Mara had sat with Quincy at the feast. Which was fine. Everyone sat with other people all the time. Bertie had ended up stuck with Mara’s stupid roommate, so it was just natural that she should have sat with Bertie’s. Not that Quincy was stupid. He was pretty awesome, and Bertie sort of thought it would be nice if they all got on and could hang out together, but well… that had to include him. He was still working out whether this was a big enough problem that he should revise his ‘play it cool’ strategy. He had not collected a lot of data so far, which made him feel like his research was inconclusive, but the one data point he had, he disliked very much.Still, in the interests of science, he had persevered. It was definitely because of science and nothing to do with being shy or not knowing what to say. He had noticed, on several reconnaissance missions around the living room, that a lot of Eva’s magazines had articles like ‘How to get guys to notice you!’ He wasn’t sure whether similar advice existed in reverse. A lot of things in Eva’s magazine (he’d been allowed to read it because it was reconnaissance) were things he definitely wouldn’t ever notice about anyone, or that would actively put him off. ‘Project an auror of confidence!’ for example. Not that he thought Mara lacked confidence or that unconfident people were more attractive, but anyone who projected anything other than powerpoint slides was not onto a winner in his opinion. He had concluded that magazines were full of nonsense, and that sticking with the strategy of sending interesting books was the best way he could think of to attract a person.
He was sitting in a nice, visible spot in the library, so if Mara happened to pass through it would be easy for her to see him. This was a risky strategy, in that all the idiots who weren’t Mara would see him too, but so far most of them didn’t talk to him that much, and he could only hope it would remain that way now. He noticed her in his peripheral vision, but continued to just casually and cooly work on his charms essay. However, he wasn’t a top spy for nothing, and he could see that she was heading in his direction. Yes!
“Hi,” he grinned, incredibly enthusiastically when she greeted him, leaving a slight blot on his essay as he dropped his quill to show that he wasn’t busy right now. “Oh you’re- you’re welcome,” he managed when she thanked him for the books. That was easy, that was just what you said when someone said ‘thank you,’ even if he sort of wanted to make her know she was more than welcome and that he’d been really, really happy to send them to her and that her hair was pretty. Then she asked if he spoke Spanish. Or rather, she didn’t. If she’d asked that, he possibly could easily have just said ‘no’ - or if she’d said ‘I take it you don’t read Spanish?’ The way she phrased her question made it seem like that was a thing she thought he might be able to do, or wanted him to be able to do.
“I-I mmmight,” he said, before realising that was a pretty stupid response because either he did or he didn’t and presumably he of all people would know that. “I-I-I mmmean--” What did he mean? He meant he wished he did, if that would make her like him more, but he couldn’t say that. “I-I-I c-c-can t-t-t-try,” he forced out. An entire three word sentence, which felt like it took an age to get to the end of. Three tiny little words and they’d taken him so long. And they probably didn’t make him seem like any less of an idiot. He could feel the heat creeping up his cheeks, and knew full well that in spite of his skin tone, the blushing he was doing was pretty highly visible.
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Bertie Jackson
You're pretty- welcome.
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Mara Morales
November 11, 2020 9:56 PM
Not entirely, though? by Mara Morales
Logically, there was no reason why Mara should have half-forgotten about Bertie’s stutter. It was, after all, pretty characteristic of the guy. Somehow, though, she had not really recalled it anyway, at least until he spoke, at which point she felt bad.“Oh – yeah, sure, that works if you want to,” she said, having a feeling this was not the right way to go about things, somehow – she had a strong suspicion, from that answer and the blushing situation that was now going on, that he didn’t know a word of Spanish and therefore would be lost as a salmon in a manmade pond if handed books in that language – but she wasn’t sure what else she could say that wouldn’t sound like she was implying he was stupid or something, especially if he did know, like, how to speak Spanish but just had never tried to read it before…. “I had trouble with it, I had to use a dictionary a lot. I guess some of it was because I still don’t know half the wizard words in English, you know? Never mind knowing them in Spanish. Still not sure it was worth it,” she added. “As far as I could get into it, everyone was like ‘well, maybe it was this one thing, but maybe it was something totally different, and we aren’t even sure when it might have started to exist even if it ever did.’ It looks like the wizards who were in with the conquistadores weren’t much more interested in what was already in South America when they got there than the regular conquistadores were," she added with obvious disappointment. Logically, there had been no reason to expect any better from wizards than anyone else, but it was still a bit of letdown to discover yet another group dominated by the stupid.
She frowned slightly, distracted from the awkward position she had found herself in by a thought. “Is ‘regular’ even the word? I don’t know about it. I mean, magic people, we’re not the majority anywhere, right? So we’re automatically not…the norm, but it feels kinda wrong to say it like that. You think?” she asked, figuring Bertie knew far more about these things than she did. Not only did he live in this world full-time, but he had already had access to materials. That implied he might know what the ‘correct’ forms of words and stuff were.
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Mara Morales
Not entirely, though?
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Bertie Jackson
November 16, 2020 2:30 AM
Can I take the fifth? by Bertie Jackson
"That sssounds like a-academia," Bertie nodded, sounding more confident as he found himself back on more familiar territory than his ability to read Spanish. He had tried a couple of times to read some of his Uncle's papers, or the textbooks dad taught from, but he could never get all the way through them. He could read abstracts though (sort of) and had asked enough questions to know that 'We aren't really sure' was a common answer, especially in humanities.He also felt a little bit reassured by the fact that Mara, who spoke Spanish fluently, had found the books difficult. Admittedly, that narrowed his chances of being able to read them down even closer to zero but at least it made it feel like there was less shame if he got nothing from them. Not 'no shame' because he was an Aladren and this was an academic challenge, and he was still pretty determined that he would read them. It just helped that Mara had given him the answer he was going to find, so that if it was like dragging himself through chest high mud, he would still have something to say at the end of it.
"Mmmaybe over Christmas? I-I'd have mmmore time, and-and there'd mmmaybe be someone a-around to help me," he added. That 'person' was Google translate. However, even if Mara could guess at that, there was no need to admit it. He was also, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, still vaguely confident he could get something out of a book in Spanish. It was just like cracking a really, really long piece of code. Words like 'is' would be high enough in frequency to spot and words like 'colonialisation' and 'indigenous' would probably be kind of similar to English.
"Yeah, we wouldn't sssay that," he acknowledged, "A-at home it would feel w-weird seeing as Mom's the o-only one who's not mmmagical." Making her not exactly 'regular' or a majority in their house. "There's Mmmuggle," he reminded her, though the face he made showed some acknowledgement that that was not an ideal word. It sounded sort of comical and patronising, though there were a few well people who wanted to reappropriate it the same way other slurs had been. "Non-non-magical," he stated, giving a slight sigh as for once his stammer decided to mess up the meaning. "I mmmmean non-non," he took a breath, "Non-non-" he cut himself off with a flustered but fluent swear word. "You g-g-get what I mean," he checked, mumbling at the table. The trouble with non-magical as a label was that it defined people in terms of what they weren't, which was always problematic. "Dad sometimes- sometimes refers to Mom as d-d-digital, but that's more a fffamily joke than a-a recognised alternative," he added.
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Bertie Jackson
Can I take the fifth?
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Mara Morales
November 18, 2020 12:55 PM
You have the right, yes. by Mara Morales
Mara was mildly surprised by the suggestion that Bertie would spend his Christmas holidays wading through books in Spanish, given how tentative the offer to try had been, but it wasn’t in her nature to dismiss ambition. Rather more to appreciate it. Therefore, her only reaction was a swift nod, followed by an easy, “sure, no problem.”Keeping a straight face – not showing that she felt like she had somehow done something impolite in breaching a subject that was so difficult for him to get the words out about, something that would make her mother or Mrs. H. or even Jessica exasperatedly remind her about acting like a lady – became difficult for a second when he gave up the attempt in clear frustration, but she didn’t have to worry about that long, as it was soon followed by a remark which made her laugh, her dark eyes sparkling.
“I like that,” she said about his mother being called ‘digital’ while he and his father and sister were ‘magical.’ “Works better than most of the stuff I’ve run across. I know they put it on the file thing that I’m ‘muggleborn,’ but that makes it sound like I was born during a mugging or something, you know? Guess that’s why I kind of forget that one a lot.” She wondered, too, if it was accurate – if her dad, at least, really was a ‘Muggle’ in the same way her mom was, or that Mrs. H. was. Obviously he couldn’t do magic, but he’d somehow had two kids – with two different women, even – who could do magic. So either it worked like hemophilia, or people like Dad were kind of in their own little category. Admittedly, the hemophilia analogy was certainly the one Jessica would agree with more readily, but Mara didn’t really like to think of it like that…Not, of course, that either of their opinions mattered. Facts were what they were no matter how the persons involved felt about them. But she’d rather think of it some other way.
“So, your mom and my mom have something in common, then,” she said instead of elaborating into that territory. “They’re…in some category we aren’t in, whatever you want to call it. Not sure Mamá has really learned to have a sense of humor about it yet, though.” She was not entirely sure how solid her mother was on the idea of humor at all, sometimes, come to that…. “Do you think it’s easier or harder, coming from both types?” she asked, curious how the world looked to someone else, especially someone who, if his mother was like hers but his father was magical, actually had something in common with her and yet wasn’t one of her sisters. Perhaps his case was different, but he, too, presumably knew about having secrets.
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Mara Morales
You have the right, yes.
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Bertie Jackson
November 27, 2020 5:31 PM
*Lips sealed* by Bertie Jackson
Bertie just nodded in solidarity with Mara's distaste for the word Muggleborn. He made a mental note to never resort to calling her that, however much other words were tripping him up. He definitely needed an alternative to non-magical though. He had come across 'Mundane' in some circles but given its usual meaning, that scarcely seemed much better. Maybe he'd work harder at getting 'digital' to stick."Two - or mmmore actually - in my mom's case," he pointed out. He had been thinking predominantly about race, as that's what they were talking about, but his mom was an abled non-magical white lady, and that was four boxes he wasn't in. He noticed that Mara had not mentioned a father at any point. When she had stated that they put Muggleborn in her file, he had assumed this reflected the distance she wanted to establish from associating herself with the word, but maybe it was also from the fact. Or maybe her dad was around but boring. That was how he felt about his mom most of the time, and he talked about his dad way more. Anyway, it wasn't really any of his business unless she chose it to be, and it was far from the most interesting topic on the table.
"I think b-both is easier," he stated. "Or mmmy version of both is," he amended, after all everyone's version of it differed. "You know enough to call out P-Purebloods on their b-bs, and to actually understand people from d-digital families. Knowing mmmore is always good, right?" he added with a grin. It was a fellow Aladren he was talking to after all.
"I also think type isn't e-e-everything," he added with a shrug. It was naive to imply that it didn't matter and they were all equal. They weren't. And pretending they were and ignoring the massive amounts of privilege that some people had was not helpful. It was just that identity was so much more complex than that. People talked about being magical, and then the subdivisions within it, like they were such hard lines. Government policy made that the case for some elements, the pervading culture being one of choosing sides, which forced the point that 'magical' became the dominant part of one's identity. But who was to say he wouldn't relate better to other multi racial kids, or other kids with stammers even if they were non-magical? The latter group was more complex because he hated to make it a defining feature of his identity. He also thought that being a magical person with a stammer gave him a different set of struggles than they faced. The worst they probably had to deal with was giving presentations - it wasn't like everyone in the non-magical world debated whether you were a safety hazard who needed to be in special school. But they would understand his frustrations the way others might not. Not that he was ready to open up and share all that with Mara just yet. He decided to pick a different example, still close to home but not quite so personal.
"T-take my cousins. They're technically P-pureblood?" he stated, giving it a little hesitation cos he could never remember whether all his great-grandparents were magical, and whether that 'counted' even if they weren't. "Obviously not sssociety types," he added. "But that doesn't mmmean they relate to other p-people just because of that. My cousin James is black, Pureblood and gay. Ssso, even taking out sssociety t-types, he probably doesn't relate to other p-purebloods as much as he does people from the other two categories."
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Bertie Jackson
*Lips sealed*
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Mara Morales
November 29, 2020 6:37 PM
That could make conversation difficult. by Mara Morales
Mara grinned, too, at the statement that knowing more was always good. “It is if you ask me,” she agreed. “I’m not sure what the bright side of knowing less would be, at least not very often.”Knowledge was power, her father had always agreed – but power came with a price, and created its own problems. Her mother emphasized the problems, suggesting it was better not to ask too many questions, better to just know enough to do what had to be done and to leave the rest to…well, she was never actually that clear about who was supposed to worry about the rest, as everyone following that advice would result in everything falling apart rapidly as everyone tried to know as little as possible. She just told Mara not to talk back if this flaw in the logic was pointed out. Of course, even Mara knew there were things – like other people’s thoughts, sometimes – that were painful to know – but it still seemed better to her to know, because otherwise one started working off a false premise.
She nodded quickly when Bertie described his cousin. “That makes sense, yeah,” she agreed. “For me - Mamá is from Colombia,” she explained. “And I don’t think there were any other half-Colombian kids in my school, yeah? But sometimes I might relate more to the kid who moved from Puerto Rico than to someone else who was born in Atlanta like I was, because we both get annoyed when idiots decide to assume we’re both from Mexico or start yelling the three words of Spanish they’ve ever heard, or whatever they’ve thought of this week.” She grimaced at the thought of said idiots. “But then – it’s also annoying if someone thinks they know everything they need to know about me just because I check the ‘Hispanic’ box on forms – and I think that would annoy me even if I wasn’t half-white,” she added as an afterthought. “I guess it’s on a case-by-case basis.” She chewed on her lip for a moment. “These ‘society types’, though – if I’m right about what that means…Mr. Row tried to explain it once, but I think he was pulling his punches,” she said frankly. “The best I could put together was that they might relate better to Leonor De Matteo than to another white person, just because Leonor’s parents have magic, if the other white person’s parents don’t. Which…it sounds kind of more like...it's like it's half-xenophobia and half-ableism? Is that right, or am I totally off-base here?"
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Mara Morales
That could make conversation difficult.
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Bertie Jackson
December 04, 2020 6:38 PM
What if I just talk about other people? by Bertie Jackson
“People sssuck,” Bertie confirmed, rolling his eyes, and making a mental note that if he absorbed any Spanish from the books over the holidays, not to try it out on Mara. “It should be u-up to us when it mmmatters,” he summarised her conflict. People pointing out or making assumptions based on your race was annoying, whether it was a negative stereotype or just treating you like a demographic, but so was the ‘I just treat everyone the same because colour doesn’t matter’ attitude.“You’re mmmostly right,” he confirmed. “Not just her p-parents but their p-parents and ssoo on. I can’t remember how-how many generations you ‘have to’ be able to trace your fffamily back. And there’s p-people who have that many generations but nnnot that a-attitude, like my cousins - maybe,” he added. “Society is just right-wing idiots with vvvarying levels of wh-what that entails, and vvvvarying levels of in-inbreeding to go with it,” he summarised, assuming that Mr. Row hadn’t touched on that side of it if he valued his continued employment here.
“I think a-attitudes are a bit softer here. B-but ‘softer’ is relative. They’ve realised that advocating for fffull on segregation is unfashionable, b-b-but I bet some of them still think it would be nice. So, they’ll talk to you in class. They’ll pretend to b-be friends with you, b-b-but they think it’s ‘beneath’ them to date or mmmarry people like us,” he explained.
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Bertie Jackson
What if I just talk about other people?
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Mara Morales
December 14, 2020 8:34 PM
That works, too, I'm amenable. by Mara Morales
Mara wasn’t completely sure that she agreed with Bertie, but nor was she sure that she disagreed with him. It hinged, she supposed, on what they meant by the word matter. Or even the words we and want….“Something,” she replied vaguely, and then flashed him one of her brief smiles. “At least get some public signs reminding people they’re not comic geniuses for jabbering ‘taco burrito’ at people,” she joked. “Though I guess that one’s a little more specific to people who look like me…specifically,” she added fairly. “Maybe signs that say ‘if you think you’ve invented a super-funny joke about stuff people in other groups do, you’re probably wrong, go away.’” She shrugged. “Or at least don’t be a jerk if someone asks you to knock it off – but guess that’s the difference between here and a perfect world, huh?”
Think of this, Mara, her father said when she brooded over the world’s imperfections. If we had a perfect world, then we wouldn’t have anything to appeal to in marketing.
It was a point, she guessed. Probably not one she should share with Bertie, though, even had the issue of her father being her father not been an issue.
She only half-suppressed a laugh when he summarized what ‘society’ was, though her amusement faded quickly enough as he continued. Instead, her lips twisted with distaste. “Polite hypocrites,” she said. “I might not know many wizards, but I know their digital versions. We get a lot of those where I’m from.” Everyone was a hypocrite sometimes, of course, but it was…different, with some people. There was minding one’s manners as a gesture of respect, and there was minding one’s manners when one planned to say something nasty behind the person’s back, because they really believed the thing that was no longer socially acceptable to say. “I guess…I mean, if they know something’s gonna happen if they say it, I guess that means the big picture has gotten a little better? But on the other hand, you don’t know who you can trust, and if all the dirt’s under the rug, you can’t really clean it up…Lose-lose there, I guess.”
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Mara Morales
That works, too, I'm amenable.
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