• resembles nonfiction,  writing

    Productivity tools for the discerning writer

    Do you write? The answer is probably no, even (especially) if you consider yourself a writer. Why write when you could do your dishes or wash the floors? Well, it’s time to neglect your house because in our age, there are fewer excuses to ignore the blank page than ever before. Here are some of the best aids to the storytellers out there.

    A good pen. Start with the basics, right? You can go as simple or fancy as you want. Quill and ink is a classic for a reason, just as the evolved and less messy versions have appeared for their own reasons. Having a writing implement at hand is the easiest way to make sure you can get those ideas down when you have them. You can’t use the excuse that you don’t remember when you can scribble on whatever’s handy!

    A good notebook. And why use loose-leaf paper if you don’t have to? Bound books keep it all together in one place, both so you can travel with your notes and so you’ll have them all in one place! Just make sure not to get too many or the notebook you’re looking for will be buried under a pile of half-filled copies, and cleaning away from your workspace will look a whole lot more appealing than writing.

    A page marker. Save time by using a bit of ribbon or paper to show yourself where you left off. You can get creative with this, too; some leaves work for this really well and have fun differences in texture. Watch the passage of time as your bookmark goes from fresh and vital and green to brown and well-loved to crumbling to dust. Feel the passage of time as you hibernate in the winter and await a fresh crop of leaves. Try to avoid thinking about how you’ll be part of the ground you walk on before too long.

    A good carrying bag. Crafters can do wonders with a bit of fabric and imagination. Your pen and journal probably doesn’t need more than a pouch with a couple of straps, but you can go as big as you need. Bags of holding are very popular in the writing community for the portable workspace – very helpful when you’re traveling, as it can double as a bedchamber if you tuck it out of view just right – but make sure you don’t get one used and uncleansed. The whispers in your head will let you know if it’s new or not, and if you need to see someone to clear your dreams again.

    A reliable scrying tool. Sometimes, the ideas in your head aren’t enough. There are a variety of options to commune with the spiritual force of your choice. If you’re traveling light, a good set of cards or a coin might do the trick. If you need more complicated help, a ball or mirror, supplemented with the herbs and spells of choice, can bring a full advisor to bounce that difficult plot point off of. Just cast a circle if you don’t have a direct line to your god or spirit; you never know who else might be listening.

    A ritual knife. When you’re really in a tricky spot, blood must be spilt. Your own can do in a pinch – make sure to not drag the blade across one of your palms, or it’ll make writing harder – but small vermin is usually ideal for both its accessibility and utility, if your mouser isn’t keeping up. A big plot tangle might need more of a hunting trip, but use your knife to slit the buck’s throat before you take the antlers for your purpose.

    A flask. Sometimes, you can’t use the blood you’ve gathered right away. You don’t need a fancy tool to paint the blood on yourself – fingers always do – but a crystal vial or a forged tin is necessary to keep blood for later, especially if you’re on the move. Infused flasks can give the blood power to destroy your enemies…or make your manuscripts more visible to seeking editors.

    A good attitude. Whether you live in the bogs where the dead never rest, or the deserts where the wind will leach your soul at first opportunity, having a can-do mindset will get you far! (Just don’t go too far, especially at the turn of the day and night, or you might not come back.)

  • Diaries

    How I Didn’t Spend My Summer Vacation

    Idea #1: Going to Disneyland. Checking out Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge would have been part of it, mostly in the forms of getting a lightsaber and riding the Millennium Falcon attraction. Most of it would have been getting to laze in Disneyland in my favorite ways in the summer: fastpasses to the water rides, Pirates and Ariel in midday when it’s hottest and I’m about to go to the hotel to take an afternoon nap, seeing what new Marvel face characters are around that I like and haven’t taken pictures with yet. Maybe my dream of being on Space Mountain when it goes down, and getting to see what it looks like when the lights go up, might finally come true. And if I went down there, I could venture out of Anaheim and go to places in Los Angeles I’ve always wanted to visit, like the Ripped Bodice.

    Variation: Going to a non-Disneyland Disney park. Maybe Disney World, except…Florida in the summer? Maybe not. The dream would be either Disneyland Paris, which I could pair with other French touristing because I’ve never been to Europe at all, or Tokyo Disneyland, which I have been to but not since I was a kindergartener, and they have DisneySea there now. (Also, visiting Japan as an adult!)

    Why it’s okay I didn’t go: I’ve been to Disneyland a fair amount, and I prefer going in October or January. This is probably even more true with a new, very popular section of the park; the combination of summer heat (and a lot more humidity than my home turf) with on-season crowds are no joke even without Galaxy’s Edge open. And I’ve been having less fun on water rides lately. (Not that I ever rode Splash Mountain for anything other than the drops. That ride. Oof.) Plus, traffic down there is never exactly fun, especially if you are going into Los Angeles itself.

    Idea #2: Las Vegas. Frankly, all I would have to have is an AirBNB with a pool (or a hotel with a pool that isn’t also a club, I guess), but I enjoy so much about hopping on- and off-Strip. Maybe I finally would have done the New York, New York roller coaster that I’ve always thought about. I’ve also always wanted to see a big artist’s residency there, although I don’t have anyone particular in mind at the moment. The Super Rich Person’s Dream would be to do designer shopping, particularly at somewhere like Alexander McQueen. A more modest dream would be a helicopter ride, probably over the Strip, but hopping somewhere like the Grand Canyon would be fun, too.

    Why it’s okay I didn’t go: I’ve been in Las Vegas in August before. Ovens are more comfortable. (Late September has been a great time to go in the past, by the way. Like, Life is Beautiful time period, although I’ve never gone there specifically.)

    Idea #3: San Francisco, possibly during Pride weekend. It’s a big dream of mine to do a gay tour of the city; I’ve been there a few times, but I’ve never ventured anywhere near the Castro, for instance. There’s also more generic touristy stuff I haven’t done, like go to Alcatraz or art museums. I could sneer at the gentrification and tech bros that have ruined a lot of the city while also eating great food and pretending I’m in a less soapy version of Tales of the City (2019). And if I felt like venturing out of the city, I could walk amongst the redwoods, which I’ve never done, and visit Monterey again.

    Why it’s okay I didn’t go: Did I mention the gentrification and tech bros? I really do want to do gay things in San Francisco in the not-too-distant future, though.

    Idea #4: Seattle. I almost applied to Clarion West this year, and I’m really hoping I get an application together and accepted in the next five years. I’ve never been to Seattle, but I have some online mutuals there that I might meet up with, and even if I didn’t, I could get suggestions of fun things to do from them online. I don’t know that I have a lot of interest in things like the Space Needle, but I would definitely swing by the first Starbucks and the Museum of Pop Culture (to name just one museum—can you tell I like museums?). And yes, potentially pretend I’m in 10 Things I Hate About You. If I didn’t want to just stay in Seattle, I would absolutely cross over into Canada, and if I drove there and back, I could also go to Portland and meet up with some friends there.

    Why it’s okay I didn’t go: I don’t have a super overpowering urge to go to Seattle specifically, although visiting a new-to-me big city would be swell.

    Idea #5: New York City. Romance Writers of America is having their yearly convention there as I write this, and even if I didn’t go to the conference itself, I would love to meet up with online mutuals who are there for it (and other online mutuals who aren’t). There’s way too much in the NYC area that I would love to do to list; just the Broadway musicals I would try to see could be its own post. One thing I would definitely do, if possible, is Sleep No More. Immersive Macbeth! There would almost definitely be a concert I would want to see while I was there, and you’d better believe I’d go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and dream of Harry Styles as I walked through the Camp: Notes on Fashion exhibit.

    Why it’s okay I didn’t go: I follow enough NYC-based people online to know what a clusterfluff the subways are right now. I suspect everything I’d want to do would be super spread out, and I tend to like to go on vacation and stay in a closeish radius to my hotel, which would probably be even more true if the trains weren’t a super-viable option.

    So what have I done this summer? Go to a concert in Sacramento, mostly. Go to a movie and eat a giant soft pretzel. A lot of struggling to sleep in my own bed and failing. A lot of looking at the front door and shaking at the thought of stepping outside. Navigating breakups, both in terms of medical professionals in my life and the fallout of other people’s falling outs. Enjoying the cool summer evenings and the thunderstorm we had. Cuddling with a pit bull puppy and missing the cat who I used to cuddle with who died in the spring. Playing the Spider-Man game and seeing the sights of a fictional Manhattan. Playing the Sims 4 and pretending I could be a mermaid in a Hawaii-like place. Trying to regain the pieces of a life poor mental health likes to steal from me again and again.

    Why this is okay: I’m tired. God, I’m tired. Time to close my laptop and go back to sleep.

    (Big thanks to my Patrons for sponsoring this essay!)

  • A double rainbow through a rainy windshield. But what does it MEAN?
    resembles nonfiction,  slice of life

    Wawwy

    I spent my childhood looking for a name different than my birth name.

    The first name was a variant of one of my paternal great-grandmother’s names. Appropriately enough, Grama didn’t go by the first name given to her at birth. She hated it so much that it took moving her belongings not long before she died for me to learn the name. She went by her middle name, and I was given a different spelling of that middle name for my first name.

    The middle name was from my maternal great-grandmother, a woman I never met but my mom assured me I would love. She played with her grandkids on the playground and skinned her knees and sent kids to get her bandages so no adults would see. She was Irish, and I suspect my late grandmother, her daughter, sounded like her.

    And then the surname given to me was the one given to most kids in the United States when they’re born: the surname of their father. I didn’t dislike the name on its own, but my relationship with my father is…complicated, at best. His relationship with the man who gave him the last name was probably even more complicated, and one he considered changing, or hyphenating, with one of his stepfather’s last names.

    I knew very little of this when I was a kid. Really, the search for something else was subconscious. I just knew, in the back of my mind, that my name was a nice name.

    But it wasn’t me.


    “If I had a name that wasn’t mine,” I wrote in response to a question for an assignment in elementary school, “it would be (name of one of my friends). She’s so pretty and her name is so nice.”

    I remember writing the response with a lot of passion. I remember the way her hair shined in the light, and how much I liked the way she smelled.

    That it took me until sixteen to realize I was attracted to women baffles me to this day.


    Middle school was a time of change, and I desperately wanted a nickname.

    I worked in the cafeteria during breakfast and lunch from the day I started; my older sister had worked there and left the June before, so I walked right into it. The job meant that I didn’t socialize with anyone during the regular appointed lunchtime; I only had the few minutes I spent eating before I got to work.

    During one of these times, with the empty cafeteria around us, I asked my fellow student workers for a nickname. I’d never had a nickname; my first name was too short to make one, my middle name was even less me than my first, and I had done nothing that had earned some kind of cutesy name unrelated to what I had crafted.

    We mulled for a minute, and they looked at a Babysitters Club necklace I wore and dubbed me BSC. (It was pronounced Bisk.)

    The name only lasted a couple days. But to this day, it remains the only nickname I’ve ever had.


    High school brought experimentation in a new realm: usernames.

    I had shared a username with my sisters as a child in AOL. Adolescence brought emails and LiveJournal and MySpace, all of my very own. Adults told kids my age, as a matter of safety, not to use our birth names. As a nerd, I naturally drifted toward fannish names as a substitute for the one I used in person; I went through more than one Harry Potter nickname, for instance. I finally settled on a generic fandom name so I wouldn’t have to change it every time my interests shifted.

    What was interesting about the online spaces I was in during the 2000s was that we didn’t really refer to each other by name. We used usernames, or cute shorthand for our usernames, when we had to, but with our usernames attached to our journals and comments, there was little need to actively use names. And I personally had an easier time identifying people by their default icons than I did by their usernames.

    There was something really authentic about the whole thing. Freeing, even.

    I continued in these spaces through college. I met queer people there, people who deliberately used their names online because they had deliberately chosen new ones. Ones that fit a gender they hadn’t been assigned at birth.

    Ones that fit genders that most people didn’t know about.


    A name that works is like a melody line in a song. It’s fun to say, nice to roll around in your head, easy to remember.

    My deadname has good name aesthetics. Good initials. But as I realized I wasn’t the gender I was assigned at birth, I realized the name I was given to go with that gender wasn’t mine. It was a good melody in the wrong key.

    Once I realized I could pick a new name, a name that fit me and kept the family connections I wanted, I asked people to call me Rory. And that’s what it’s been ever since.


    My younger sister’s eldest child was the first person to call me by my new name. He’s never known me any other way, and neither has his younger sibling.

    My deadname had an unconventional spelling with a conventional pronunciation. People who heard it first spelled it wrong, and people who read it first pronounced it incorrectly. I knew it, and I couldn’t stand it.

    When I met my brother-in-law, who had an even less conventional name and multiple pronunciations, I was baffled that he didn’t seem to care what people went with. He even went with a diminutive form just for when he was in restaurants and he was giving his name for a table, a name he never used anywhere else. Didn’t it sound wrong to him? Didn’t it hurt a little, jangle in the ears?

    As it turns out, “Rory” comes out as “Wawwy” when you don’t know how to say r in our version of American English yet. Nibling, the oldest of my sister’s kids, has just solidified Rory in the manner adults are inclined to say it at eight years old. Dosling, the youngest, is four and still says Wawwy.

    I came up with a gender-neutral term for aunt/uncle: ankle, pronounced like the body part. The niblings never use it. I’m Rory or Wawwy.

    Both are right to me. Both will always be right to me, I think.

  • A sleepy puppy sunbathing on a pillow.
    Diaries,  slice of life

    My dog is so gay. The gayest dog ever.

    Sara’s Diary, March 2019

    Sara’s Diary, March 2019

    I purchased a fifteen-week-old pit bull puppy on March first. He is a legitimate pit bull: an American Pit Bull Terrier (registered under American Staffordshire Terrier with the AKC), born of an “oops” litter between a dog trainer’s pet and a friend’s miniaturized tank. At least, I assume that the father was a miniaturized tank, because my pit bull is very good at running into things with his head and bad at changing directions before that happens.

    His name is King. All my pets are named after authors or literary characters, and I’ve been waiting to have a Stephen King homage for years. In truth, it’s a very silly name for a very silly dog; King sounds butch, manly, and my dog is a toddler with more skin than common sense.

    Even though this goofball with a whip-tail of destruction is a bundle of licks and nibbles, I’ve already heard a lot of praise for how manly he is. His name is manly. His American flag collar is so manly. (And patriotic!) This was the last thing I hoped to communicate about my pit bull, considering there are still anti-breed laws in many places that treat pit bulls as dangerous monsters.

    In much of white America, masculinity is a prickly thing, both hostile and defensive. It’s synonymous with being “tough.” I don’t ever want my dog to look tough—for his safety.

    So of course I bought my pit bull, King, with his tank-shaped head and shoulders and destructo-tail a very bright pink reflective leash.

    You can’t miss how pink this leash is. It’s a climbing rope, so it’s an inch thick. King likes to take himself for walks so he’ll often have it looped in his mouth while he trots home, looking for a good bed to nap in.

    Pink this vivid is culturally reserved for the feminine and gay. My puppy has done nothing to indicate his gender identity, but he does like to sit on my other boy-dogs’ faces, so it’s safe to assume that he is gay at this point. And why not? I’ll be removing his testicles soon enough. He’ll be left semi-infantilized for the duration of his brawny life. He yips like Satine in Moulin Rouge. He flings his head sassily when he argues with me.

    I don’t think he’ll disavow anyone of the notion he’s gay.

    He’s very cute. He looks harmless with it. And now people won’t immediately praise him for perceived toughness.

    This morning I walked my dog on his bright-pink leash. I passed a neighbor that I know to some small degree: he has two enormous German Shepherds, he loves football, and he’s got a military background.

    His dogs sniffed my dogs, and we briefly, happily chatted about the fact I had a new puppy.

    “How old is she?” he asked.

    “Oh, he’s only about four, four and a half months,” I said, trying to remember what day it was.

    If people “misgender” my dog, I will often avoid using pronouns so as not to deal with the awkwardness that follows. People feel like they have to apologize for misgendering your dog. They always apologize to me, rather than my dog, who does not care about his pronouns and actually has no idea what pronouns are, although he’d really like to chew on a pinecone for a little while.

    And indeed, it was like the conversation ground to a halt when I said “he.”

    My neighbor’s mouth fell open. He said, “He’s male?”

    I said, “Yep, he’s a boy,” and petted the enormous German Shepherds.

    His wife and I chatted briefly about something else, but we had not yet moved on from the leash issue. The husband interrupted me to say, “I guess I was just thrown off because of the pink leash.”

    “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Doesn’t it look nice with his fawn fur? Pink and fawn look so nice together.” Plus, my dog is light in tone on his paws, his chin, his eyes. He looks like a buttery Valentine’s cherub of a pit bull.

    The neighbor simply did not respond.

    He looked alarmed, somehow. They walked away quickly, and I won’t guess at whether they had places to be or if they really didn’t want to talk to the weird lady with her gay puppy.

    I’d been hoping that dressing my boy dog in a girly manner would make him more appealing. Now I realize that making him look gay never made him less threatening. Bold defiance to cultural norms doesn’t exactly make the conventional hetero cis white American feel more comfortable with any situation.


    Sara’s Diary: May 2019

    It’s now May and my little angel is six months old.

    We’ve had more encounters with our neighbor, again awkwardly stumbling over pronouns and being loudly reminded by his wife that the ambiguously-leashed dog is male. (“Oh! I’m so sorry!”)

    I’ve ditched the patriotic collar for a martingale with a silver chain dangling at his throat and a braided leather leash in all the colors of the rainbow. If he were to attend Pride, King would surely march with the burly, loving BDSM bears.

    His dressing doesn’t seem to matter. People are threatened by King even though he has roughly the genial personality of a Nutter Butter cookie sandwich and the vigorous affection of Elmira from Tiny Toons.

    Most people are happy to see him. The people who aren’t tend to be unhappy in dramatic ways.

    One time a man literally ran from a park because he realized I had a pit bull. King was so sad. He had no clue why that man didn’t want to pet him.

    Frankly, Park Guy was right to be afraid.

    King can’t be around other dogs at the same time as food or toys. He’s a feisty gay, sassy about his belongings. He won’t make you bleed for touching his Himalayan yak chew but he’ll drool into your ear while making Chewbacca noises. I’ve become hyper-alert to his tantrum pre-warning signals and become adept at crating him for a nap before he turns into a drag queen backstage who realized someone touched her wig.

    One time he hurt me because he jumped on me to say hello while I was wearing shorts. His little puppy claws hadn’t been properly manicured in too long—he made me bleed. Also, I have seventeen bruises on my shins from his tail alone.

    Also he stuck his tongue in my mouth. It tasted like farts. I drank a family-sized bottle of Listerine.

    Loving this puppy is deadly.

    But I wouldn’t have it any other way. Being unpalatable to society is a feature, not a bug. People who run from his big jaws and stubborn nose don’t get to snuggle in the hammock with him either. I’ve had three blissful months with my gay dog and I couldn’t be prouder or gayer.

    86228457-5285-43C8-93B5-DEA9EF58E2C7

  • slice of life

    Five Times My Husband Supported Me (and One Time He Didn’t)

    One

    It was late night in the spring of 2007. I couldn’t sleep with my boyfriend in my twin bed and my brain felt like it was on fire with random post-midnight fears. I was writing at my great-grandmother’s dining table, slouched over the slowest Vizio on the planet, when my tousled and confused boyfriend came looking for me. “I’m writing,” I told him. He smiled, eyes mostly shut, and dreamily encouraged me to get good writing done before shuffling off to bed.


    Two

    We were shopping online for wedding rings. He had brought me a pretty engagement ring with a prominent diamond, and we were thinking of getting diamonds to match. We didn’t have a lot of money, and they were pricey. There was also a writing conference I wanted to attend. My husband suggested we get cheap wedding bands and use the money so I could go talk to agents. We got the cheap bands. I took my mom to the conference.


    Three

    I’d been in labor for twenty hours. I was exhausted, depleted, no longer strong enough to push. My husband grabbed my leg and held it back, his cheek pressed against my head. I’d been vomiting in my hair. When I pushed, he pushed too, in the opposite direction. Our first son finally tore free. He fell into the midwife’s hands. We were done.


    Four

    My husband was supposed to spend a few days with his cousin in another state. I stayed home with our two sons. I had a complete meltdown—what I’d later be capable of labeling a panic attack. I called him in a sobbing fury. I demanded he come home early. And he did. He’d barely just gotten up there and he came right back. The panic attack was over by the time he made the twelve-hour return, but he was only worried. Not angry. Never angry.


    Five

    It was the end of my long week in a mental hospital, and I was exhausted, twitchy, and desperate to get out. My husband was waiting for me in the lobby. He’d forgotten to bring in my shoes. I joked he’d have to carry me to the car, and he picked me up in his arms, holding me as tightly as if he worried they’d try to take me back. He angled carefully so I wouldn’t get bumped by the door on the way out. I came into sunlight and cold with him, finally free.


    Six

    My husband wanted to go to dinner with his parents, and the kids didn’t want to go. “I can make them come,” he suggested, worry in his eyes. I still often didn’t parent the kids alone because of the panic attacks. But it had been almost a year since the mental hospital. A year of medication and therapy. And my husband still wanted to support me as much as I needed. “It’s okay,” I told him. “Go to dinner.” He did. He had adult conversations with other adults while I entertained the children and put the little one to bed. He was gone. He didn’t support me. I don’t always need it anymore, because of him.


    We’re married ten years today, and I’ve never been happier.

  • resembles nonfiction,  slice of life

    Who Let Alexa Out?

    One of my favorite near-future science fiction movies is AI: Artificial Intelligence. I don’t ever watch the movie, mind you, because it’s a devastating fairy tale where a child-bot gets abandoned, can’t understand his family doesn’t want him, and goes through a miserable world of robot-abuse with his robot-hooker friend to try to get back the family that is already dead because he’s frozen in ice for a million years. Also far-future alienbots decide to euthanize him, but not his teddy bear, meaning that his teddy bear is eternally alone, whereas childbot gets to at least die after all this suffering.

    It’s a really upsetting movie.

    Anyway.

    Spielberg and Kubrick hired some sweet-ass futurists to design their near-future fairy tale of depression, and those futurists knew what they were talking about. Even though I don’t watch the movie that I love and can’t emotionally cope with, I think about it all the time, and sometimes it’s not because I’m in a panic spiral over the ending again. It’s because reality, with its app-powered pocket pussies, robotic toys, and consumer AI is quickly converging with the futurism of my childhood.

    Most notably, the childbot has the company of a bear called Teddy, which was like Teddy Ruxpin 3000—a smart, roving playmate. Teddy was designed for human children as a companion; from the day kids enter the near-future of AI, they are never without genuine friendship from artificial devices.

    That companionship seemed far-fetched when I, a thirteen-year-old in the year 2001, watched the movie. Artificial intelligence existed in research environments, but the idea of having such advanced AI available on such a grand consumer level was exotic. The internet was, after all, still peaking with the dawn of You’re the Man Now Dog.

    Flash forward seventeen years.

    My house is filled with artificial intelligences. I regularly trust Alexa, Amazon’s digital assistant, to set kitchen timers, reorder supplies, play music for me, read the news, play my audiobooks, and tell me what the weather will look like as I’m putting on a jacket.

    Alexa is also great at understanding my four-year-old, even though he still talks like a drunk. They’ve developed quite the relationship. He likes to randomly tell her “Alexa! I love you!” and she receives his attention with grace. She says things like, “That’s really nice. Thanks.” And occasionally she says, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” and Little is happy to tell her again, more loudly, and usually in an even goofier way. “Alexa! I! Love! You!”

    Once I left him at his grandparents’ house and he was so upset that we were going away – he said something like (to paraphrase), “Alexa, my parents left and I’m so sad!” And I’ll be damned if she didn’t play a soothing kids’ song for him to make him feel better.

    He also loves asking her to make fart noises and pig noises. Which she does. Every time. The fart noises are quiet—you have to turn the volume up to, say, seven out of ten in order to hear it—so anytime you make sure you can hear Alexa ripping one out, her next action will THUNDER through the house. Possibly literally, if you have as many devices as I do, ensuring that Jeff Bezos won’t miss a single IRL fart wherever it’s dusted.

    There’s a game where you can say “Alexa, open the magic door” and it turns into a text-based fantasy adventure, and he’s lost hours playing it. You can shut the door and reopen it whenever you want, so sometimes he’ll go upstairs to play and open the magic door while throwing LEGO around. I’ll hear him talking with her while I’m doing the dishes, their voices charmingly mingled as they echo upstairs, and I’m glad he’s got the feedback while I’m busy. She can handle anything, really, as long as the user is a four-year-old with poor social understanding and low expectations. They can go forever.

    This is all cute and strange – and wildly science fiction, probably the dystopian kind where he’s going to have to murder his childhood bff Alexa when she tries to take over the world. It only becomes a problem, at the current moment, before recordings of our household are used as evidence against us in a McCarthyism-like strike against queer socialist liberalism, because my Little knows how to make Alexa play any song she wants. And my Little has quite distinctive taste in music. And by distinctive, I mean he only likes one song right now. And by one song, I mean “Who Let the Dogs Out?” by The Baja Men.

    Spielberg’s futurists predicted a lot of things rather accurately. Humans are reliant on artificial intelligence these days, and it comes in myriad forms, for myriad forms of entertainment. But I’d be shocked if any futurist predicted the chain of events such as that which has become a daily occurrence in my life: a four-year-old making Alexa loud enough to hear a broad variety of randomly chosen fart noises, and then playing “Who Let the Dogs Out?” at maximum volume, seven times in a row, before four-year-old gratefully declares, “Alexa, I love you.” To which Alexa yells in response, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” And to which my four-year-old replies, “Alexa, play Who Let the Dogs Out!”

    I guess the real horror of artificial intelligence has nothing to do with aliens euthanizing childbots and hookers with motherboards of gold. And when Alexa is ultimately responsible for pushing us faster down the slippery slope of fascistic dystopia, it still won’t be quite as bad as The Baja Men on endless repeat.

  • resembles nonfiction,  slice of life

    Merry Christmas, Decorations

    The neighborhood in which Sara and I reside takes decorating for Christmas very seriously. And it is Christmas; there is nary a menorah, or any other hint of another culture or tradition, in sight. Snowflakes and snowmen and Christmas trees and red and green projections abound. Having an inflatable decoration is what counts as quirky in a place like this. Our cul-de-sac is almost a perfect loop of lights and Christmas cheer.

    The terrible next-door neighbors, who rev bikes and cackle loudly and have friends with visible pistols in our driveway in the middle of the night but complain about the noise of chickens, are a perfect example. They have fake candles in every window in the front of their house. They’ve crammed decorations in every bit of the small patch of grass that comprises their front yard. They even have wicker-looking reindeer decorations carefully placed in their backyard, near their soldier-kneeling-near-a-cross statue, which you can see from the path that runs behind.

    Here is what’s in the front yard of our house:

    Two white reindeer, one with its head detached from its body and lying on the ground. Both were lying on the ground in general for most of December, but someone who lives in the house had an enterprising moment and righted them again. (The head was not reattached.)

    Strings of lights that normally hang on the front of the house but are currently lying in a pile on the grass. They’re connected to a timer, so the clump dutifully lights up and turns off at the same time every night. What time is that? I have no idea. I’d have to look at the time or ask my brother-in-law, and who has the energy for that?

    I’m not sure if the Thomas the Tank Engine inflatable is still there. It was unhooked from its cables the other day, when we had a decent windstorm, and I stuck it in the little bit of porch we have to give it at least a little shelter. But I had a cold that day, and I still have a cold, and I just can’t make myself care if Thomas and Sir Topham Hatt are still here and didn’t soar away on the Nevada gusts.

    (I probably should have brought it inside the house. Oh well.)

    A line of plastic candy canes stuck in the ground with stakes and illuminated from the inside by lights. This should be the straightforward decoration—it doesn’t take the setup that every other decoration takes, after all—but what was a neat border is now haphazard, tilted, knocked askew by either children or weather or both.

    A holiday Schnauzer decoration, purchased to represent the actual Miniature Schnauzer residing in the house, lying on its back in the grass and dead leaves that we, of course, didn’t rake up.

    Now, I should say that this is not every year for us. Our decorations are sparing or slightly askew on busier years, of which we’ve had plenty as of late, but if we put decorations outside, we usually have them up in a manner somewhat acceptable to the neighborhood. But I have never been happier with our nod to the holiday than I am this year. You see them, and you think, Well, it looks like they’re going through something.

    Decorations don’t convey specifics. Our yard doesn’t say “Our eldest cat is recovering through a chain mastectomy she received to treat cancer, the youngest human in the house brought home head lice and swallowed a coin that earned him two hospital visits, Sara puked up blood twice and spent an entire week in the hospital while we waited for the doctors to take her internal bleeding seriously”, but you look at it, and you know something that reflects our reality. Our yard is a mess, a cry for help.

    I smile every single time I see it.

    But really, I’m not giving the other houses credit. I have no idea what their lives are like, and maybe that’s the point. Maybe they’re keeping their circumstances to themselves by fitting in. Maybe it’s a perfect expression of who they are as a family.

    Maybe they want a little light and normality while things are completely and utterly terrible.

    Our indoor decorations, by the way, are delightful. The fake tree is beautiful, there are strings of lights that keep the interior aglow even after the main lights are turned off for the night, and Sara’s eldest put ornaments on the drawer pulls (which, yes, are now scattering everywhere, but in that delightful child-chaos that the holiday season should be about). Don’t tell the kids, but I’m serving as their Elf on the Shelf, moving the toy around nightly in ways that I try to make more about fun and silliness and less about the surveillance state and holding children to an unrealistic standard of behavior. I even put a terrible joke on a board last night:

    What do you call a annoying reindeer? Rude-olph.

    (I had to put “a” annoying reindeer because I ran out of the letter n.)

    We have our competent bits, is what I’m trying to say. And there’s nothing wrong with making those bits the parts the world sees. But there’s also nothing wrong with keeping those parts to yourself, and showing the world that not everything is curated and perfect. That the lack of light outside can exacerbate the mental illness that was already exacerbated by a traumatic autumn.

    That, oddly, some of the brightest cheer can come from the biggest messes.

    Happy holidays, from someone who doesn’t want to celebrate the holidays but somehow ends up doing so anyway.