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I didn’t typically enjoy shopping for clothes or shoes or makeup. My only real indulgences were office supplies and reading glasses.
I mean, when the stores rolled out the school supplies, I was a happy, happy camper. And then when school started, and those same supplies were suddenly on clearance? It was like Christmas.
On top of all of that, I didn’t have a social life to speak of. Aside from Imka, I didn’t really have any friends. And even Imka was just a “work friend.” So I didn’t need a going-out budget.
So, it didn’t bother me that, yeah, this man might be making a small fortune off of his app. What mattered to me was that he was trying to bring something that I was so passionate about to the masses.
It would just be nice if he maybe gave me a little credit somewhere. If I had that, I could possibly get my students to download the app, fall in love with playing it, and get hungry for more information from me.
That was always the goal.
To get the next generation as interested in history in general, but the myths in particular, as I was. Or even half as interested as I was.
“History and culture and the beliefs those cultures held are internal parts of the human collective; they explain wars and the reasons civilizations leaned into or away from certain things that may have inevitably helped or hurt them.”
That was something I remembered my father telling me when I was a little girl grumbling about learning about the real-life wars waged in ancient worlds.
I always preferred the stories when I was little, my brain not wanting to wrap itself around the atrocities that human beings were capable of.
I could excuse genocide and mass rape from fictional god characters, but not from people who were out there hurting other people.
It took a few more years after that to harden my little heart to the ugliness people were capable of, the new and horrific ways they came up with to harm one another, but I eventually came to detach myself from it the way my father had, and began to agree wholeheartedly with his mindset about understanding culture.
Because the more educated you were on such things, the less likely you were to be okay with atrocities happening to other people in your lifetime.
If you could step back and see the situation as it would appear in the history books, with clear aggressors and martyred victims, you were never going to side with the bad guys as it was happening.
Ignorance was the mother of most atrocities.
Since only ignorance could breed hatred and only hatred could create evil. And only evil people could hate one another for things as trivial as the color of their skin, how they worshipped, and where they lived.
So the more we could get our youth passionate about education, about history in particular, the brighter the future would look.
It was why I contributed a lot of donations to public education television. Why I gave my money to documentary streaming services as opposed to entertainment ones. And why I was going to help this annoyingly hot professor with his app.
You had to meet the kids in their spaces to pique their interest.
TV. Movies. Music. Games.
I’d actually had one student impress me with his knowledge of a couple historical figures that he claimed he learned by watching and listening to a music video that actually had people acting like those figures and battle rapping.
One of the other professors on campus once tried to, well, turn one of his lectures into a rap.
It, yeah, it hadn’t gone well.
To quote the kids, it was “cringe.”
Though, apparently, he’d gotten over a hundred-thousand likes on a video a student uploaded of the whole debacle.
“Professor! Look what I got!” Tilly, one of the afternoon librarians said as I started to walk past her desk.
In her hand was a massive brick of a book with a blue and gold cover that I’d never seen before.
“Oh, what is that?” I asked, moving closer.
Because if there was one thing that could distract me from my meeting with the hot professor, it was a good new book.Especially one coming from Tilly who had the best taste in books I’d ever come across.
“This, my darling girl, is a book about Ariadne.”
