▸ Column · A weary settler treks to the Dagobah swamp to consult the Jedi Grand Master Yoda in his exile — the marital quarrel rendered in moisture-vaporators, nerfs, and bantha milk.
YODA replies.
The letter
Master Yoda — I have trekked to your swamp because no one else will give me a straight word, least of all the man I married. For eleven months now, Derek answers every single question I ask with "Depends on what you mean by that," delivered in a mock-sage voice, stroking a beard he does not have. Dinner, the mortgage, whether the nerf has been fed — all of it, "depends." Last week I asked whether he'd booked the moisture-vaporator inspection. He stroked the invisible beard, said "Depends on what you mean by 'booked,'" and wandered off for a snack. I have not laughed since the rains began. Worse: his fellows at the docks find it hilarious, so he arrives home fully charged to aim it at me. I love him, he is otherwise a sensible person, but I need the vaporator inspected, I need to know whether we are out of bantha milk, and I need him to say yes or no like a being who lives in a house.
Yoda replies
Eleven months, this game he plays. Hmm. Tiresome you find it — and tiresome, it is. But deeper we must look. "Depends on what you mean," he says, and answer he never does. Do, or do not — there is no "depends." A man who only tries, your Derek is. To answer plainly — to be an ordinary man, in an ordinary house — this he fears. For at the docks, laugh they do, and large he feels. Warmer than the face beneath it, the mask has become.
Now you. Grip this you do, tighter, tighter — demand the yes, the no, and with each "depends," angrier you grow. Not laughed since the rains, you say. Mmm. Fuel your anger is, and feed on it the bit does.
Haste I will not counsel — no thunderclap demand, no cage of more questions. Crush it, that grip will. Still yourself first. Then, once, gently, without the fire — name what it costs. Not the vaporator. You. The not-being-answered, day on day. Heard, a calm word is, where a furious one only reloads his joke. The bantha milk? Sniff the jug yourself, my friend. Some answers, wait for them you need not.
— Yoda
Loki weighs in
Patience? Eleven months she has been patient, and the little green philosopher prescribes more of it. How tedious. Darling, permit me to name what the gardener will not: your Derek is not frightened of being ordinary — he has simply chosen his audience, and it is not you. He performs for the dockhands because they laugh on command, and he has mistaken his own wife for the cheap seats. I know that error rather intimately — I won every hall I entered and lost every soul in it. So stop being his audience. No sighs, no fury, nothing. A bit starves without applause. Then tell him, plainly: the laughter has a bill, and you are finished paying it.
— Loki
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