WIP Re-Intro: Lessons in Humanity from a Future Physicist
Genre: Literary Fiction, Coming-of-Age | Status: Rewriting | Playlist | Pinterest
Way back in the day—I think on my old account, which I lost the password and the email for—, I wrote a WIP intro for Lessons in Humanity from a Future Physicist. Looking back, it’s not up to the standards that I hold now, which is a sign that things have changed for the better. Things have also changed since then.
Lessons in Humanity is my oldest work. This year, it turns ten years old. That’s older than 3/4 of my sister’s kids, older than my relationship, and older than even my own name. It’s crazy to think that I’ve been writing this book for almost half of my life, and crazier still that I keep changing things about it. These are characters I made when I was a lonely, angsty tweenager who was feeling weird things about my gender and place in the world.
The first draft of Lessons in Humanity, which was called We’re All Dead After All, was a disaster of depression that honestly concerns me, looking back at it. I was deeply sad at this time. Things have vastly improved since then, though I still do like a tragic story every now and then.
It’s no longer a story drenched in my own pre-teen depression; it’s a story about growing up and changing. I think that’s what makes it so personal to me; that I’ve been changing things about it as I’ve grown up and changed.
Lessons in Humanity is about Kam Suzuki and his best friend Zach Amsel as they begin their first semester at Miami University (in Oxford, Ohio). While there, Kam has a difficult time adjusting to the change and finds himself crumbling under the weight of some issues he has yet to deal with.
A more literal way to put it is: Kam experiences the absolute Hell I went through (mentally) when I graduated university.
It’s more of a literary fiction character study than something with a big, overarching plot. Think My Year of Rest and Relaxation literary fiction versus The Secret History literary fiction. Nothing big and grand happens in it. It’s a quiet story about a guy slowly wearing himself into nothing and then building himself back up (with the help of his friends). There’s a romantic subplot that I only ended up adding because it felt natural.
I think what makes Lessons in Humanity so important to me isn’t just that I’ve been working on it for almost half my life. It’s also that, whenever I go through a difficult time of change, I come back to it. Case in point: I’m writing this update right now because, in six weeks, the American branch of my company will lay us all off. Lessons in Humanity brings me comfort when I feel directionless because Kam feels the same way. Dare I call it my comfort work.
As a (likely-autistic) trans guy myself, Kam was me before I was even me. For all the time I’ve been writing him, Kam has been a way to understand myself and the things I felt. Of course he’s like me.
My biggest hope with this book is that it does for others what it’s been doing for me. I love Lessons in Humanity when I’m feeling unsure and afraid of change. If it can comfort other people in those times—or any other time—, then I consider it to be a success, no matter what. The idea of Lessons in Humanity from a Future Physicist being someone’s comfort book makes me want to cry.
I haven’t done a full rewrite of Lessons in Humanity since 2020. Since then, I’ve gone to university and gotten (part) of the full experience, and I’m going to add quite a bit of realism to what wasn’t accurate before.
(My husband and I are going to go on a small trip to Oxford, Ohio in October once the layoffs are finished so I can get a little bit of a refresher on the town. I haven’t been in two years, and that was back when I was doing Doordash.)
Kam Suzuki
One of my first ever queer characters, Kam will always hold a dear place in my heart. It’s not that much of a joke when I say that Kam is my self-insert character. When you list out our traits, we look almost the same. And yet, I do take some steps to make Kam a little different from me. I take aspects of people in my life that I love (which I do for all of my characters) that are far different from me and put them in him.
Despite being obsessed with his physical fitness, Kam is someone who doesn’t deal with his problems. He locks them in his chest and lets them claw away at him until he can’t stand it anymore. Unfortunately, that happens to him during the events of Lessons in Humanity. There’s some stuff he’s been holding in for far too long, like his trauma from walking in on his twin brother’s suicide attempt, along with his general hatred of things changing and fear of abandonment.
Kam’s lifelong dream is to work for NASA. He’s been obsessed with space and science since he was a small child, so of course, he’s a Physics major. He’s also the type of person who works himself to the bone for success. (In this way, we are the same.)
Zach Amsel
Something I love about Zach is that it feels like he’s the other part of me. What Kam didn’t get, it seems like Zach got. Zamsel is the type of indie soft boy that I easily catch crushes for, with my “anxious but slutty bisexual” energy and unruly curly hair.
When it comes to Zamsel, I would just like to say: his playlist is composed of a lot of The Front Bottoms. He’s a sad boy who gets into a lot of bad situations with toxic romantic partners that take advantage of him. While I’ve changed the timeline of a couple relationships of his, the fact that he’s willing to get with almost anyone who shows interest in him is equal parts depressing and frustrating. For both everyone in the novel and myself.
Bad taste aside, Zamsel is a sweet guy with an incredible competitive streak. He and Kam have been competing with each other for years now, and they still push each other towards success.
Nikki Espinosa-Jasso
Nikki is a Mechanical Engineering student who shares an art class with Kam and Zamsel. She’s a year older and wiser, a bit jaded, and overall, a little abrasive on the surface, but she has a heart of gold. I think we’ve all met a person like her. Her main love languages are acts of service and getting food together.
She’s receiving what is pretty much a total overhaul. Where she used to be a quasi-mother figure to Kam and Zach, I’ve decided to make her a little more feral and a lot less maternal. Nikki needs to be a more interesting person outside of the boys.
Vic Suzuki
Kam’s brother who is still in high school since he didn’t skip a grade when Kam did. When I first created him, he was your typical 2014-era emo, which has now become a 2024 Tiktok alt boy, I guess. Blue hair, lots of piercings, black hoodies under leather jackets, bold tattoos, bisexuality. He was my gender goal when I created him, and honestly, I’m pretty damn close to it right now.
In the past, Vic was depressed to the point of attempting suicide, which Kam walked in on and was traumatized by. Vic doesn’t know this. He’s gotten better since then, and has far better coping mechanisms. Honestly, he has some of the best mental health in the book, which is a huge change from how he was in WADAA.
He has goals now (that don’t include being dead). Vic is trying to line up a tattoo apprenticeship when he graduates high school.
Gerard Shimmish
Kicked out of his parent’s house for being gay, Gerard has been living with the Suzuki family for about a year and a half. He’s Vic’s boyfriend and best friend, and a general ray of sunshine. We don’t see as much of Gerard as we did in WADAA, which is a shame. Gerard is a character I pour a lot of my optimism into.
His big thing is helping people. He wants to be a social worker or a psychiatrist. Something where he works with LGBT youth like himself.
He’s getting some minor character edits to make him a little more interesting, but overall, I think Gerard’s a sweetheart. I might borrow some traits from my husband to give him some more depth.
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hello!! do you have any recommendations for books or essays about becoming a better reader of poetry? I love the poems you post and esp love when your tags go into what you got out of it / understood from it, bc it’s always so much more than I was able to interpret on my own. and I want to become a better reader and learn how to really sit with a poem and get into all its layers but idk where to start.
I stand behind the recs in this post, but since you want to focus on poetry and poetics, in addition to William Empson's The Seven Types of Ambiguity and Helen Vendler's Poems, Poets, and Poetry, I'd also recommend Christopher Ricks' The Force of Poetry, I. A. Richards' Practical Criticism, and Jorge Luis Borges' The Craft of Verse. They are all beautifully written, by people whose love of the form transcends academia and becomes, at times, a kind of secular worship. I loved poetry before I fully understood language, back when it was just incomprehensible mouthwords my parents repeated to get me to sleep; I'd have loved poetry even if I never toiled a day in the hermeneutics mines, like my grandmother reciting Eugene Onegin after her dementia cleared everything else from the table—she wasn't sure what it meant, all she knew was that this was the nicest thing she had. Isn't that a kind of faith?
There are other good books about how to read poetry, but these were the ones that initiated me into a conspiracy of words, they taught me to be curious about why I liked a poem, how to take pleasure in its vivisection without worrying I'd kill that faith—like martyrs, good poems never fall apart when you open them up, they yield. If anything, the practice of explication has made me even more of a fanatic. I hope it does the same for you!
If there are poets you already like, I can get more specific about recs—I'm partial to modernist poetry, but that just means I like following breadcrumb trails of allusions to lots of different literary traditions and can tell you where the bodies, hatchets and/or treasures are buried.
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