Jennifer Lee Noonan

Bonus Level Unlocked

Mon, 10 May 2021 10:52:29 -0500

This week marks the release of Jason Schreier’s Press Reset, an incredibly well-researched book on catastrophic business failure in the gaming industry. Jason’s a good dude, and there’s an excerpt here if you want to check it out. Sadly, game companies going belly-up is such a common occurrence that he couldn’t possibly include them all, and one of the stories left out due to space constraints is one that I happen to be personally familiar with. So, I figured I’d tell it here.

I began working at Acclaim Studios Austin as a sound designer in January of 2000. It was a tumultuous period for the company, including a recent rebranding from their former studio name, “Iguana Entertainment,” and a related, ongoing lawsuit from the ex-founder of Iguana. There were a fair number of ghosts hanging around—the creative director’s license plate read IGUANA, which he never changed, and one of the meeting rooms held a large, empty terrarium—but the studio had actually been owned on paper by Acclaim since 1995, and I didn’t notice any conflicting loyalties. Everyone acted as if we always had been, and always would be, Acclaim employees.

Over the next few years I worked on a respectable array of triple-A titles, including Quarterback Club 2002, Turok: Evolution, and All-Star Baseball 2002 through 2005. (Should it be “All-Stars Baseball,” like attorneys general? Or perhaps a term of venery, like “a zodiac of All-Star Baseball.”) At any rate, it was a fun place to work, and a platformer of hijinks ensued.

But let’s skip to the cutscene. The truth is that none of us in the trenches suspected the end was near until it was absolutely imminent. Yes, Turok: Evolution and Vexx had underperformed, especially when stacked against the cost of development, but games flop in the retail market all the time. And, yes, Showdown: Legends of Wrestling had been hustled out the door before it was ready for reasons no one would explain, and the New York studio’s release of a BMX game featuring unlockable live-action stripper footage had been an incredibly weird marketing ploy for what should have been a straightforward racing title. (Other desperate gimmicks around this time included a £6,000 prize for UK parents who would name their baby “Turok,” an offer to pay off speeding tickets to promote Burnout 2 that quickly proved illegal, and an attempt to buy advertising space on actual tombstones for a Shadow Man sequel.)

But the baseball franchise was an annual moneymaker, and our studio had teams well into development on two major new licenses, 100 Bullets and The Red Star. Enthusiasm was on the upswing. Perhaps I should have paid closer attention when voice actors started calling me to complain that they hadn’t been paid, but at the time it seemed more like a bureaucratic failure than an actual money shortage—and frankly, it was a little naïve of them to expect net-30 in the first place. Industry standard was, like, net-90 at best. So I was told.

Then one Friday afternoon, a few department managers got word that we’d kind of maybe been skipping out on the building lease for let’s-not-admit-how-many months. By Monday morning, everyone’s key cards had been deactivated.

It’s a little odd to arrive at work and find a hundred-plus people milling around outside—even odder, I suppose, if your company is not the one being evicted. Acclaim folks mostly just rolled their eyes and debated whether to cut our losses and head to lunch now, while employees of other companies would look dumbfounded and fearful before being encouraged to push their way through the crowd and demonstrate their still-valid key card to the security guard. Finally, the General Manager (hired only a few months earlier, and with a hefty relocation bonus to accommodate his houseboat) announced that we should go home for the day and await news. Several of our coworkers were veterans of the layoff process—like I said, game companies go under a lot—and one of them had already created a Yahoo group to communicate with each other on the assumption that we’d lose access to our work email. A whisper of “get on the VPN and download while you can” rippled through the crowd.

But the real shift in tone came after someone asked about a quick trip inside for personal items, and the answer was a hard, universal “no.” We may have been too busy or ignorant to glance up at any wall-writing, but the building management had not been: they were anticipating a full bankruptcy of the entire company. In that situation, all creditors have equal standing to divide up a company’s assets in lengthy court battles, and most get a fraction of what they’re owed. But if the landlords had seized our office contents in lieu of rent before the bankruptcy was declared, they reasoned, then a judge might rule that they had gotten to the treasure chest first, and could lay claim to everything inside as separate from the upcoming asset liquidation.

Ultimately, their gambit failed, but the ruling took a month to settle. In the meantime, knick knacks gathered dust, delivered packages piled up, food rotted on desks, and fish tanks became graveyards. Despite raucous protest from every angle—the office pets alone generated numerous threats of animal cruelty charges—only one employee managed to get in during this time, and only under police escort. He was a British citizen on a work visa, and his paperwork happened to be sitting on his desk, due to expire. Without it, he was facing literal deportation. Fortunately, a uniformed officer took his side (or perhaps just pre-responded to what was clearly a misdemeanor assault in ovo,) and after some tense discussion, the building manager relented, on the condition that the employee touch absolutely nothing beyond the paperwork in question. The forms could go, but the photos of his children would remain.

It’s also a little odd, by the way, to arrive at the unemployment office and find every plastic chair occupied by someone you know. Even odder, I suppose, if you’re actually a former employee of Acclaim Studios Salt Lake, which had shut down only a month or two earlier, and you just uprooted your wife and kids to a whole new city on the assurance that you were one of the lucky ones who got to stay employed. Some of them hadn’t even finished unpacking.

Eventually, we were allowed to enter the old office building one at a time and box up our things under the watchful eye of a court appointee, but by then our list of grievances made the landlords’ ploy seem almost quaint by comparison (except for the animals, which remains un-fucking-forgivable.) We had learned, for example, that in the weeks prior to the bankruptcy, our primary lender had made an offer of $15 million—enough to keep us solvent through our next batch of releases, two of which had already exited playtesting and were ready to be burned and shipped. The only catch was that the head of the board, company founder Greg Fischbach, would have to step down. This was apparently too much of an insult for him to stomach, and he decided that he’d rather see everything burn to the ground. The loan was refused.

Other “way worse than we thought” details included gratuitous self-dealing to vendors owned by board members, the disappearance of expensive art from the New York offices just before closure, and the theft of our last two paychecks. For UK employees, it was even more appalling: Acclaim had, for who knows how long, been withdrawing money from UK paychecks for their government-required pension funds, but never actually putting the money into the retirement accounts. They had stolen tens of thousands of dollars directly from each worker.

Though I generally reside somewhere between mellow and complete doormat on the emotional spectrum, I did get riled enough to send out one bitter email—not to anyone in corporate, but to the creators of a popular webcomic called Penny Arcade, who, in the wake of Acclaim’s bankruptcy announcement, published a milquetoast jibe about Midway’s upcoming Area 51. I told Jerry (a.k.a. “Tycho”) that I was frankly disappointed in their lack of cruelty, and aired as much dirty laundry as I was privy to at the time.

“Surely you can find a comedic gem hidden somewhere in all of this!” I wrote. “Our inevitable mocking on PA has been a small light at the end of a very dark, very long tunnel. Please at least allow us the dignity of having a smile on our faces while we wait in line for food stamps.”

Two days later, a suitably grim comic did appear, implying the existence of a new release from Acclaim whose objective was to run your game company into the ground. In the accompanying news post, Tycho wrote:

“We couldn’t let the Acclaim bankruptcy go without comment, though we initially let it slide thinking about the ordinary gamers who lost their jobs there. They don’t have anything to do with Acclaim’s malevolent Public Relations mongrels, and it wasn’t they who hatched the Titty Bike genre either. Then, we remembered that we have absolutely zero social conscience and love to say mean things.”

Another odd experience, by the way, is digging up a 16-year-old complaint to a webcomic creator for nostalgic reference when you offer that same creator a promotional copy of the gaming memoir you just co-wrote with Sid Meier. Even odder, I suppose, to realize that the original non-Acclaim comic had been about Area 51, which you actually were hired to work on yourself soon after the Acclaim debacle.*

As is often the case in complex bankruptcies, the asset liquidation took another six years to fully stagger its way through court—but in 2010, we did, surprisingly, get the ancient paychecks we were owed, plus an extra $1,700-ish for the company’s apparent violation of the WARN Act. By then, I had two kids and a very different life, for which the money was admittedly helpful. Sadly, Acclaim’s implosion probably isn’t even the most egregious one on record. Our sins were, to my knowledge, all money-related, and at least no one was ever sexually assaulted in our office building. Again, to my knowledge. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure we remain the only historical incident of corporate pet murder. The iguana got out just in time.

*Area 51’s main character was voiced by David Duchovny, and he actually got paid—which was lucky for him, because three years later, Midway also declared bankruptcy.

Voiceactors in my Head

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 08:22:35 -0500

One of my many contradictory feature sets is a silent, circumventing stubbornness paired with a pathological fear of confrontation. I will get what I want, and I will not stand my ground if verbally pressed on it. I concede points like it’s an Olympic sport. But as long as everyone’s still smiling—gently, snidely, or otherwise—then I can go on forever. Case in point, I once trolled a stranger on the internet for over a year. (Don’t worry; by the end of the story you’ll be on my side again. And if you’re not, well, I mostly agree with you.)

It all started with a CD which was, at the time, exclusively available through the record label’s website. This was back in 2005, when online retailers still ran on frontier justice and only fools uttered the words “free shipping.” Needless to say, I did not have an existing account.

But we do what we must. So I bent the knee, and delivered my modern-day rogation of name, email, and PII governed by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in order to receive my one CD—then I defiantly wasted that effort by never patronizing their establishment again. I mean, the album was fine, and I’m sure they had other struggling artists whose work I would have enjoyed, but apparently I’m against creative expression and the American small business owner or something.

Anyway, five years of blissful non-interaction go by. Then one day in 2010, I get a mass email from the founder of this little indie record label. It was—or at least it aspired to be—a classic “starting a new chapter” kind of announcement, letting everyone know that he had sold his (incredibly!) successful company, and was using the proceeds to start a charity that would bring music lessons to inner city children.

And, hey, I thought, that’s cool. Music is great for kids. Except… the tone of the email was weird. It was more than just casual; it was chummy. The concept of a YouTuber didn’t exist back then, but here was its primordial ancestor, testing the beachhead with its nascent flipper-legs of peppy chic.

“Yo, J-dawg, how’s it hanging? Remember back in [mail-merged year] when you bought [whatever]? What a great album, am I right?! Anyway, it’s been so long since we rapped, I thought I’d update you on my sitch…”

Obviously, I’m paraphrasing, but that’s how the voiceactor in my head performed it. And it just rubbed me so hard the wrong way. I mean, look, I get it—we live in a promotional society, and there’s no avoiding that. I’ve done my fair share of book pimping, and if you have a legitimate fan base the intrusion can even be a welcome one. So, fine. Tell me about your thing—once—and maybe I’ll buy it. But don’t act like we’re friends, like I have some kind of obligation to you beyond this basic consumer relationship that we’ve established.

So my gut reaction was a hard pass, pleading children’s eyes be damned. But the email didn’t include a link to unsubscribe. This spammer was so brazen, he had sent the message from his personal email account, as if threats like “more updates to come!” belonged in anything but a ransom note font. If I wanted my name off the list, I would have to actually write him back, creating exactly the kind of low-stakes, one-on-one confrontation that we all know is worse than torture.

How would I even phrase it, knowing that his overture was from the heart and my rejection would travel right back along that path? “Listen, amigo, I know you probably spent an hour composing this raw, honest self-reflection on your priorities, but it’s garbage, and I never want to hear from you again. Please keep in mind that while you have failed to inspire me, you’ve also failed the children. Because you’re a failure.”

The actual words wouldn’t matter; I was sure that’s what he’d hear. In fact, I would argue that a polite rejection is often worse, because it leaves no option for the rejectee to write off the loss as a dodged bullet. They really were a nice person, and you’ll probably never find anyone so humble again, you loser.

So instead, I got out my favorite piece of social armor: the ironic “yes, and.” In improv theater, if a scene partner implies that you’re the best of friends, you don’t argue with them. You commit to the bit. So I did.

“Oh my God, Steve, it’s so good to hear from you!” I wrote (except I used his real name, of course.) “I can’t believe you still remember our special album. Makes me weepy just thinking about what it meant to us. Anyway, here’s what’s been going on in my life…” Then without warning, I dumped several years’ worth of emotional trauma on him—about severe autism, and how hard day-to-day life was, and how each treatment brought hope and frustration in equal measure while somehow never easing my crippling fear of the future. It was a therapy session on steroids, directed at a stranger under the guise of bitter sarcasm. My flippant sign-off left no doubts about my true feelings: “Anyway, as I’m sure you can imagine, we are flat broke with medical bills, bruh! So I’m gonna need you to take us off your list. But in the meantime, here are some autism charities that you could donate to on our behalf, since we’re such good friends.”

To be clear, open snark isn’t remotely in the spirit of “yes, and.” But it felt better in that moment than honest rejection, and I figured he’d take the hint.

Instead, the guy wrote back.

“Wow, what an amazing story!” he said. “Crazy world we live in. I’ll go ahead and take you off the list, but I do hope you’ll think of us in the future.”

Ugh. He had met my bad behavior with empathy, and I felt moderately ashamed. Then again, you couldn’t argue with results, and at least I knew this ordeal was behind me.

Except he didn’t take me off the list. A couple of weeks later, I get another fake-personal email, which I must again paraphrase, though I remember with furious precision the way it made me feel. “Heyyyy Jenn-ster, it’s me again! I know how much you’ve always loved music, so I know you’re gonna want to hear about this…”

BITCH. YOU. DON’T. KNOW. ME.

“Steve, what happened?!” I wrote back. “You used to be such a good listener! I think the money’s changed you, man.” And I asked once again to be taken off the list.

This time, he ignored me. No reply, and the spam kept coming.

So I just decided that this was going to be our thing. Every time he sent me an email full of stuff I didn’t care about, I was going to send him an email full of stuff he didn’t care about. Except I kept pushing it a little farther each time, like, “Ooh, potty training’s not going so great, let me tell you all about it…” And at the end of every email I’d always remind him, “Hey, anytime you want to stop getting updates on my son’s bowel movements, all you have to do is take me off your list.” Sometimes I bolded it; once I super-sized it into a 40-point font. But he never did.

This went on for over a year.

But I won.

It’s a trite saying, but sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. The last email I ever got from this guy was short, which was unusual for him, and it said something like, “Great news! We’ve just graduated our first class of students—check out these pics!” (Why am I paraphrasing so much, when email is forever and I could just go back and give you direct quotes? Stop asking questions and roll with me for a minute.) Anyway, embedded in the email, like already loaded and filling the screen HTML-style, was this giant picture of… I don’t know, a kid kissing a trumpet or something. It was probably super cute, to be honest—but I was on a mission.

“Great news!” I wrote back, trying as always to mimic the exact structure of whatever he had sent me. “My son just had a colonoscopy—check out these pics!” And I pasted the actual medical photos of my child’s rectal passage into the email, pre-loaded and filling the screen, so he’d be forced to view them against his will, just as I’d been forced to endure his endless marketing crap.

Sure enough, he never emailed me again.

Pretty good story, right? And that closer—I mean how can you top sending medical photos to a complete stranger just to gross them out? Unfortunately (or fortunately; I’ll leave it up to you,) this one has a weirdly philosophical denouement. If you like your narratives sassy and single-layered, I suggest you duck out now.

Around 2015, I was trawling my past for wild stories that could be condensed into a tight three minutes for open mic night, and ‘that time I emailed colonoscopy pics to a spammer’ was an obvious contender. Once I had the basic structure written down, more or less exactly as I remembered it, I went digging through those ancient emails to finalize the details.

And what I found was… not what I remembered. The story I told above clearly had some emotional embellishments (see: paraphrasing), but it was fundamentally true in circumstance, I thought. And, yes, I really did send this guy two pictures of my son’s colonoscopy, though they were just thumbnail attachments, not embedded. But the text of my actual emails to him barely came off as snarky at all, and I never once told him in clear terms to take me off his list. There are a few lame hints at irony that you can pick out if you really squint, but by and large I was just… writing him back. Like we were friends.

Which is a good thing, because his emails to me were even less accurate in my memory than mine had been. He hadn’t cut me off; he’d replied to every single email I’d sent, in a way that made it clear that he’d watched every video and read every article. He was cordial, empathetic, and seemed genuinely interested in my kids. It was a therapy session on steroids, all right—minus the steroids.

BITCH.

YOU. KNOW. ME.

And in return for all this kindness, I had sent him horrific medical photos for no reason. To which he had replied (and this time I’m not paraphrasing,) “Thanks for the update on your son. I appreciate it. Keep up the good work. All the best to you both.” The updates from him had indeed ceased after that, but from what I can tell it was just a coincidental winding down of that particular enterprise, not a removal of my name from any specific list.

Eventually, I ended up emailing him again, this time as a penitential mea culpa to ease my own conscience. I explained the situation, and apologized for my unfair judgment of years past, plus of course the unsolicited sigmoid landscapes. He thought the whole thing was hilarious, and admitted that he’d never once picked up on my poorly-conveyed bitterness.

More important than the personal amends, though, was the lesson I had to swallow about how emotions don’t just cloud memories—sometimes they invent them out of whole cloth. I swear, I swear I remember a photo of a kid graduating from his charitable music lessons, but I can find absolutely no evidence of it anywhere. My brain made it up to retroactively justify my behavior: yes, I sent a photo, but only because he sent a photo first. It’s not even a remotely good justification, but I guess it took the edge off just enough to keep seeing myself as a good person.

It was an important lesson professionally, too. History is nothing but a mashup of inherently self-serving memories, and multiple perspectives can only draw a narrative closer to objective truth by half-steps, never to fully reach its destination. Even hard evidence is fallible, because my emails as written did not accurately represent how I felt when I wrote them, which is an important part of the story in its own way. Misinterpretations and flawed perspectives are inevitable, but they’re also necessary, and stripping them out as a historian is just as wrong as taking them at face value. A story is both what the participants think it is, and what we know it isn’t—especially when those two conflict—and every non-fiction piece I write is just somebody else’s therapy session on steroids.

Naming Conventions

Fri, 27 Mar 2020 12:32:58 -0500

My thirteen-year-old son has always been a little obsessed with generational titles. It comes up fairly often in our house because my husband (born in ‘77) is a solid GenXer who likes to tease me (born in ‘80) as if I am a millennial. Insofar as any of this stuff is real, I am by all measurements in GenX, if only barely, and therein lies the gag—if only barely. Defending my right to belong to one overly-broad stereotype over another would be a waste of ones and zeros, but rest assured I have the receipts.

At any rate, my son loves this running joke in our house, but it’s given him a bit of a complex over what his generation will be called. He knows that the millennial birth range ended around 1996, and feels that we’ve had more than enough time to get our act together for his 1997-2017 cohort. He wants an identity, too, and not just the generic “Generation Z” placeholder that everyone’s been using so far. I have explained to him that generations are most often defined by things that happened during those years—Boomers remember Vietnam, but GenXers were too young; GenX remembers air travel before 9/11, but Millennials only know the aftermath. We just have to wait until his generation’s defining moment comes along, I say.

Now, finally, it seems we have an answer to his question, though I am no happier for it. Some have floated the nickname “coronnials” to commemorate his generation’s experience with the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020, but I think time will prove it too cutesy for the tragedy that is still unfolding around us. Nor does it accurately capture the anger and resentment that our children have already begun to feel toward our failings—plural—of which pandemic vulnerability has only recently taken the crown from mass shootings, and may yet still be outdone by climate change in the end. We have left them holding the bag, in so many ways.

I keep hoping that my children and their friends will somehow get a positive moniker out of it. Maybe some play on the expression “the buck stops here,” I think wistfully: something that highlights their role in fixing the mess we’ve left for them, rather than being subjected to it. Something that avoids victimhood. But wistfulness is not a natural state for me. Instead, I can’t stop thinking about something my son said recently, as he skimmed the headlines that have inundated not only news and social media, but even the chat rooms of his favorite videogames.

“It’s funny,” he said, “a lockdown is usually something you do in school, but now it’s the reason we can’t go to school.”

The casualness of his joke made it all the more poignant. He wasn’t trying to make a snide observation on modern society; he was just making a silly pun. For him, lockdowns are a basic fact of life, just like Generation X took their latchkey schedules in stride, and Millennials generally shrugged off corporate ownership of their data. It’s defining because it’s normal, and like all normalcies, it’s heartbreaking. Generation Z is the Lockdown Generation, and we should all feel ashamed for our role in making it so.

Eligible For Parole

Sun, 31 Mar 2019 17:07:15 -0500

“You really have a lot on your plate, don’t you?”

He lobs it out there with a dexterity that would make Liberace jealous, just letting it waft between us like a bored sniper’s bullet. Even I am impressed.

Not that I didn’t see it coming. This is the standard, due-diligence part of the interrogation, when boxes are checked and cans of worms are given a curious shake before putting them back on the shelf. Neither one of us enjoys it, I suspect. Even a good salesman would have to lean heavily on the optional features—upgrading the base indifference model with a judgmental assumption add-on, perhaps, or splurging on the genuine curiosity undercoating. Trust me, when you drive one of these babies as often as I do, the difference is like night and day.

That his gentle salvo was posed as a question at all shows a level of confidence found only in the extremely wise or foolish. Normally, I have to field this sort of query Alex Trebek-style: “It sounds like you really have a lot on your plate,” “My, what full plates you have, Grandma,” etc. Instead, this maverick’s just come out and asked, like some kind of crazy genius who makes the chief nervous but always gets the job done.

Hell, even his timing is admirable. My son has just left the room, and we have about sixty seconds before my daughter enters for Act II of our psychiatric appointment double-feature. That’s just enough time for him to test the waters, but not enough for the dam to burst, if it’s going to. Because he’s not really asking; he’s gauging. Psychiatrists are from Mars, therapists are from Venus, and exhortations of “don’t fix my problems just listen” are completely antithetical here. We are in Problem Fixing Central.

It’s easy to see why the doc is compelled, if only perfunctorily, to probe for rot beneath the fascia. On his Venusian counterparts’ couches—loosely woven, mottled brown, and laden with pillows to fiddle with, in contrast to his firm upholstery in decidedly-grey, taupe, or muted green—the classic prompt is always, “Tell me about your mother.” Right? Everyone has a fucked up relationship with their mom, that’s why they’re in therapy. And the practical obverse of that universal truth is this: if you are a parent trying to secure mental health treatment for your child, you are immediately and inherently assumed to be part of the problem.

They don’t come right out and say it, of course, just like they don’t raise an eyebrow at their patients and call them crazy. They ask questions, always a little too casually. They make leading statements. They poke. They prod. They give you standardized questionnaires to measure your child’s attachment level, which are really just measuring your parenting skills.

Don’t even get me started if you’re bringing in more than one kid.

They’ll figure out you’re a Good Mom eventually, assuming the blame truly does lie with chemistry rather than the home environment. (If it doesn’t, they’ll figure that out even sooner.) But they’re still going to check in occasionally, like our doc does on this lazy afternoon in the middle of Spring Break. Because it is hard, and the effects of caring for a family member with mental health needs are cumulative. For the “just listen” types, this harmless little probe can be a welcome opportunity to unburden—for sixty seconds at least. For the jaded and fiercely independent like me, well, my best advice after over a decade of dealing with the system is to just lie back and think of England. There’s no point getting defensive over the fact that they’re testing you yet again. Be like Morgan Freeman in Shawshank Redemption, when he stops telling the parole board what they want to hear and lays out the hard truth of his life without drama or apology.

Yes, I do have a lot on my plate. This plate you can see isn’t even my biggest one right now. I’ll let you know if I drop one.

Swallow Your Dreams

Sun, 24 Feb 2019 09:34:33 -0600

All languages, but English especially, like to pilfer foreign words for concepts we wish we’d thought of first. Burrito. Kindergarten. Cul-de-sac. (Direct translation: “ass of the bag” in French. Which I think we can all agree is spot on.)*

But the reverse is also true: we sometimes dislike an idea so much that we can’t stop naming it. Utopia. Shangri-La. Eden. Zion. Arcadia. Erehwon. Cockaigne. Camelot. Xanadu. Beulah Land. Lotusland. Neverland. The Good Old Days. We may think we’re into it, but trust me—the more names something has, the more we despise it.

In the case of utopian fantasies, I think we love-hate them so much because we know ecstasy must come with suffering. Not in a ‘moral justice of the universe’ kind of way, but in a ‘how can you know what wet is if you’ve never been dry’ kind of way. Sometimes the suffering itself gives us hope—sincere pipe dreams tend to crop up when the news is at its worst. Conversely, a lack of suffering makes us nervous, giving way to satirical illustrations of paradise that either chastise our disappointment with mediocrity, or exhort us to fly a little closer to the ground. The only time we drop the subject is when, God forbid, we surpass one standard deviation on the joy curve, at which point our fear of jinxing it forces us into a superstitious, but no less aware, silence. Spectacle is the lens through which we first recognize boredom, and other punning metaphors for what is ultimately a pretty basic philosophical idea.

Anyway. By general agreement, we now find ourselves in one of those Bad News Eras, and the little Dutch boy has long since run out of fingers to hold back the flood. Idealism is rampant, regardless of how angrily it may present itself (and usually in opposition to other forms of idealism.) Meanwhile, the incorrigibly cynical among us can only sigh as we wait for the waters to recede. All of which is to say, I read an article recently. And it annoyed me.

We’ve all heard some version of the old saw that “the world needs garbage collectors;” i.e., polite society has needs that presumably no one would cater to in the cloud-cuckoo land where everyone Follows Their Dreams. Personally, I tend to side with Drew Carey and Mike Rowe on the matter. This annoying article, in contrast, promoted the central thesis that technology would render the “dirty jobs” problem obsolete, thanks to ever-increasing automation. It predicted that in the near future we would achieve, if not Utopia, then at least the particular sliver of it that oversees labor markets.

And honestly, the author could be right. Maybe we’ll all have a housecleaning sex robot, and the self-driving firetrucks will aim their own hoses, and the farm machinery will pick the fruit and monitor the soil conditions far better than humans ever could. Maybe we’ll all get to be painters, and singers, and writers, and comedians, and movie stars, and the indoor plumbing will sort itself out. There are, we must admit, significantly more jobs in the creative sector now than there were 50 years ago—we’re at Peak TV, y'all!—and that pattern can surely only continue.

Aside from the obvious practical considerations, however, this wonderland has a particular Achilles heel that I want to address: everyone will be miserable. (Which, if you’re keeping track from earlier, makes this post one of those Dystopia We Never Saw Coming, Be Careful What You Wish For, Icarus Get Your Ass Back Here kind of stories.)

The thing is, humans like to work. Or more accurately, humans require validation, and hard work provides it with very little outside help. Chop the firewood and feel its warmth through the winter; tend the seedling and taste its delicious fruit. But can you write a song that no one ever hears, and still feel good about it? A few can, and they generally end up draped with popularity they never needed, because output unbridled by fear is the best kind. But most professionally creative people will admit they are inborn approval junkies who have only found success in the business by forcefully taming their instincts—reminding themselves on a daily basis that haters gonna hate, as they say.

The misconception is seductive, though, especially when the known goblin of “fame” is replaced by less vain euphemisms: successful artists are “beloved,” and “respected,” and have “earned their creative freedom” (don’t get me started)… and bystanders tend to assume that all that apparent validation must be pumping through their veins at great speed. To work in a creative field is to install a zen-secreting organ just behind the pancreas, while the rest of humanity is left staring wistfully into the night screens, watching the elite get high off their stash and telling themselves that if only they had the time, or the money, or the housecleaning sex robot, they too could spend all day being creative, and feel just as good as their successful counterparts appear to. Give one of those folks a toe in the door and a deadline, and it won’t be long before they project their individual craving onto us all—say, for example, in an article from a well-known tech platform, which imagines just how great it will be when we can all follow our surprisingly-similar dreams in a tight spiral around one another, gaily refusing to look down at the sink drain below.

But in fact, a microcosm of that supposed nirvana already exists, here and now: it’s called YouTube. Millions upon millions of users with eight views, zero validation, and a numerically-proven feeling of worthlessness. They were creative, and no one cared, which was all they actually wanted in the first place. They tried to make a deal with the devil but even he didn’t bother to show up. And when the milk and honey dispensers become fully mechanized, the pain of that realization will only come harder and faster: creativity doesn’t provide validation. Creativity flows naturally after validation has been secured elsewhere.

When I wake up already knowing that I’m worthwhile, I am able to be creative. When I have the love of a family—biological or chosen—I am able to be creative. When I consider secret personal accomplishments to be as meaningful as public ones, I am able to be creative. Unpleasant tasks and hard work don’t stand in the way of my dreams; they fill a hole that my dreams were never going to fit into properly anyway. To envy a creative person’s life is to look at a garden and assume it’s flowers all the way down, rather than a deep slurry of mud, worms, and fertilizer that allows beauty to spread freely over its surface.

The only real way to follow your dreams is to forge ahead on your own and trust that they’ll keep up. If you can already write the book assuming that no one will read it, congratulations—this message is not for you, and you probably stopped reading a long time ago anyway because you’re not looking for answers. But if you dream of a creative life free from worry, pain, sadness, frustration, and all the rest of the working world’s supposed drudgery, then you’re better off not knowing what you’re missing. And if you’re writing utopic articles suggesting that universal creative employment is a desirable—let alone inevitable—reality, then you’re especially foolish, because you’re promoting a cult of chugging when you’ve already sipped and found it lacking in flavor.

*Side note: Let’s all say a sad farewell to the phrase “literal translation,” whose first half has by now been thoroughly co-opted by the totally-seriously-for-real crowd. Like oh my God you guys, it literally translates that way. Totes McGoats.

Mum’s the Word

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 11:21:15 -0600

Terminology can be hard to keep up with. For example, is it “tweep” or “twitterati?” Certainly we can all agree that “twitterer” is orally untenable.

Speaking of things that are untenable: Twitter. Like all of us, the social media giant is destined for rot and replacement, and that’s fine. But in these pre-destiny times, Twitter periodically intrudes on my awareness, and even goads me into Talking About Things, as per its business model. Unfortunately, I can’t discuss a lot of those things in 240-character soundbites without triggering an avalanche of trolls (also per Twitter’s business model, but that’s a topic for another day) so please indulge me as I perform the internet equivalent of screaming into a pillow, AKA blogging about it.

Though paraphrased in a few different ways, a relatively unified and righteous chant strode through certain Twitter communities recently, exhorting their followers to “make them say which ones”—as in, “when conservatives lament that ‘you can’t say anything anymore’ due to ‘political correctness,’ make them say, specifically, which of their favorite words are no longer permissible, thus forcing them to admit that the list contains nothing but vicious slurs.”

My hot take, of course, is that this supposed checkmate is disingenuous. There are words which, though not intentionally horrific, have fallen out of fashion for one reason or another, and can earn the clueless or stubborn old-timer a disproportionate backlash. Note that I did not say an inappropriate backlash, only a disproportionate one, because we should all be expected to grow alongside society if we hope to remain part of it. But there are some words which have always been offensive, and others which only became that way after decades or even centuries of aboveboard, if ignorant, use.

Take, for example, the bygone job title of stewardess. In the opening pages of my first book, I wanted to include a short essay by Emily Perl Kingsley on the subject of raising a special needs child. Ms. Kingsley generously granted permission for the reprint, but with the firm caveat that I must use the most recent copy of the text, which she attached, rather than any older versions I might find elsewhere. A quick comparison revealed that the only difference was the replacement of the word “stewardess” with “flight attendant.” I don’t know what sort of reproach Ms. Kingsley had faced since first writing her essay in the 1970s, but she was positively adamant that I get it right in this printing. Similarly, I know an elderly gentleman who was booed—actually booed, out loud, by a number of bystanders—for politely calling a flight attendant the other thing to her face. (Okay, you got me, they were bysitters, or perhaps byloungers as it occurred in first class.) He was baffled, then embarrassed and angry, as most of us would be in response to such a public shaming.

Now, I’m not arguing for some inalienable right to say “stewardess” without consequence. The practice of separating employment by gender is, in my personal opinion, dumb, and a growing majority of Americans agree, though application remains inconsistent—no one yet gasps at “actress,” “ballerina,” or my own bête noire, “male nurse.” But there is a big difference between an old guy who truly didn’t get the memo versus, for example, my nasty Great Uncle Harold, who tried to teach my brother at the age of nine to call his slingshot an “[n-word] shooter.” That fucker was ill-intentioned, and we’re all glad he’s dead. The guy on the plane, on the other hand, was a proto-feminist who supported his wife’s entry into the workplace back when it wasn’t taken for granted, and now he’s bitterly convinced that the so-called “language police” are going to level unfair accusations at him no matter what he does.

The sad truth is we all get old, and learning new things gets harder. Here’s one that I absolutely know is going to bite me in the ass someday: Indian-style. For younger readers, that’s what they used to call sitting with your legs crossed in front of you, an ankle under each knee. Was it racist? Sure, about as much as stewardess is sexist. Do we call it something different now? Absolutely—but unless you are or have a young kid, I bet you don’t even know what it is. You may think you know what it is, and you’re undoubtedly wrong: “cross-legged” enjoyed only a brief transitionary period in the late 80s until the real term took hold, and is now firmly ensconced in the old-person terminology vault.

Are you ready to take the linguistic red pill and learn the truth, my friends? Today, they call that posture “criss-cross applesauce.”

Ugh. Feel that little ball of indignation and disgust in your gut? I mean, how stupid is that phrase? Cross-legged would have been fine! But I’m here to tell you that no one under the age of 32 has any idea what cross-legged means—we lost the vote. We might hold out for a while longer, but if we want to communicate effectively in the future, we’re all going to have to say, out loud, as grown-ass adults, that we’re sitting criss-cross applesauce.

That’s exactly how stupid “flight attendant” feels to people who grew up saying stewardess.

And yes, they still have to say it, because society changes, and the vast majority of people genuinely don’t want to hurt anyone else’s feelings. They’re willing to try, and they should be. But they’re still going to screw up sometimes, just like I know I’m going to accidentally say “Indian-style” someday as my grandchildren’s eyes widen in horror. We’ll have an easier time routing the actual racists (and sexists, and homophobes, and transphobes) if we extend some compassion and forgiveness to folks who are genuinely doing their best.

“Well, congratulations,” the Twitterverse responds, #sarcasm hashtag in hand. “You came up with two things you can’t say anymore. We’re not convinced.”

Okay, cool. Here’s another one: “smoking crack,” as in, “Sorry, I must have been smoking crack when I submitted this overly complicated plan to the PTA.” True story. I said a slightly more contextually relevant version of that to a group of parent volunteers, and I got in trouble, because it turns out the phrase we used constantly back in the 90s is now understood to be hurtful, thanks to the government’s role in pushing crack on black communities while extending leniency to predominantly white cocaine users. And I’m fine with that—the new designation, that is. I won’t say it anymore. But it would have been nice to find out in a less public manner and have my wrist slapped a little more gently, you know? (If this is the first you’re hearing of it, you’re welcome. Always happy to spread the word.)

Or how about “retarded,” one of only three words to ever get reduced to code via initial letter? Defenders like to jump in with the fact that mental retardation used to be a medical diagnosis—still is a medical diagnosis, actually, removed from the DSM-V but easily found in the ICD-10 codebook as well as numerous public school forms—but medical legitimacy is, if anything, an indication that the word will be misused sooner rather than later. Moron, idiot, and imbecile all used to be official medical terms, with defined IQ ranges. The word dumb used to indicate mutism, epileptics were formally known as lunatics, bipolar patients can trace a double-hop through manic depressive back to maniacs, and a whole host of symptoms used to fall under the official diagnosis of hysteria—one of the first to go, fortunately, since it was very unsubtly derived from the Greek word for uterus. Medical terms by definition describe non-majority traits and conditions, which are precisely what bigots use to single people out and write them off. One day a doctor earnestly declares, “He’s a moron,” and the next day someone sneers, “he’s a moron,” and just like that, the theft is complete. The responsibility does indeed fall on us to separate ourselves from the bigot, to reject his hatred through new terminology because that’s the battlefield he chose. You don’t bring a knife to a word fight.

But the important thing to understand here is that the evolution never stops. Earlier, I used the phrase “special needs child,” but in fact it’s already on the way out. Consider this lyric from the miniseries Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, released in 2008:

With my freeze ray I will find the time, to find the words to
Tell you how—how you make—make me feel—what’s the phrase?
Like a fool. Kinda sick. Special needs. Anyways.

It’s the earliest mainstream example I’ve found of “special needs” being used in a non-clinical way—and thus a pejorative way, no matter how innocently meant. I don’t blame Joss Whedon (for this, anyway,) because the phrase was destined to become an offensive relic with or without his help. But he certainly gave it a shove in that direction.

And the shoves these days are coming harder and faster: “moron” enjoyed medical prevalence from 1910 to 1977, almost 70 years. As a euphemism for disability, special needs took off around the same time moron bowed out, meaning it needed only 45 years to offend. Autism, by comparison, entered common usage after the release of Rain Main in 1988, with synonyms like “neurodivergent” and “neuroatypical” already in limited circulation by the early 2000s and the patently reprehensible “autistic screeching” meme entering the vernacular in 2016. Just 30 years and counting.

When it comes to staying ahead of offensive terms, we’re rapidly approaching the singularity, where polite euphemisms may be swiped by trolls and aimed back at us almost as soon as they’re invented—and that’s going to require more lenience for the well-intentioned, not less. Even if we do somehow manage to take a collective breath and slow things down, there will eventually come a day when my book’s subtitle, One Family’s Journey Through Autism, sounds as antiquated and loathsome as My Idiot Children: A Memoir.

And again, that’s fine. I won’t cling to the old words when the inevitable happens, because the only way for society to repudiate cruelty through language is to choose new language. But I also know that I will slip up occasionally and tell people my children were diagnosed with autism, because they fucking were, and I may have to endure the gasps and perhaps even audible booing from those around me. I can only hope that my grandkids will recognize that I’m doing my best, and not lump me in with ableist pieces of shit like their Great Uncle Cody, or Dylan, or whatever the hell his name ends up being.

#TooMe

Sun, 30 Sep 2018 09:07:39 -0500

My father categorically hates my author headshot. “You’re hiding half your face!” he cries.

He’s not alone, but neither is he in a solid majority. Friends my age had all voted for the behind-the-hand smirk, and it was only after my dad’s complaint that curiosity compelled me to expand my sample group. Turns out, it’s a generational litmus test with guaranteed returns: younger people prefer the image I chose, while older respondents always go for a more portrait-studio look that I had lately tossed in the reject pile.

It wasn’t a grand revelation. Geezers are stodgy, judgmental misanthropes who self-embalm for fun on the weekends. Whippersnappers are lewd, unprofessional slobs who value getting high over the sovereignty of lawns. As it has been, so it always shall be. Maybe there’s a fresh dimension worth exploring via the lens of social media—young people are understandably disaffected with posed images of reality, meaning their trust can only be bought with photographic candor—but probably not. Holden Caulfield was railing against “phonies” 40 years before an obstetrician spanked Mark Zuckerberg’s upside-down ass.

But lately, I’ve been realizing there’s another narrative lurking behind my awkward façade, and more specifically, the photo shoot that produced it.

I should start by pointing out that I didn’t want my picture next to the blurb for No Map to This Country. Celebrities go on the cover, mid-tier authors get a headshot inside the flap, up-and-comers aim for a thumbnail, nobodies like me get nothing—and this was an agreeable situation all around. I’m very anti-self-aggrandizement, especially when that self is me. But after what I can only assume was a protracted and gruesome brawl behind the scenes, graphic design triumphed over social hierarchy. The back cover’s layout was deemed to be short on balance, and I was asked to submit a photo after all.

So I did the professional thing and hired a photographer, but with the understanding that I wanted something casual and hip: a semi-candid snapshot that would prove I wasn’t putting on airs just for having one dang book on the market. Nice clothes, but an outdoor setting—preferably one with grit, like a cool brick wall or some dilapidated wood. Nothing says “I reject the artifice of this process and am on your side” like dilapidated wood.

We ended up in the kind of swanky shopping center where the torn jeans are $200 but the fake-urban backdrops are free. Morning “golden hour” tends to precede retail activity, so we mostly had the tasteful walkways to ourselves, but about every five minutes a stranger would pass by. Some were business owners preparing to open, others were clearly on their way to the financial services office at the end of the complex, but oddly enough, all of them were men.

I’m sure you see where I’m going with this.

Let me pre-emptively state that I was not assaulted, harassed, or unreasonably interrupted while doing this photo shoot. No crimes were committed, and I have no lingering trauma. This is more about what I accepted as normal at the time, and how maybe solving the big things has to involve acknowledging the little things as well.

The point is that every single man—no exaggeration, every single one—made a comment as they passed, usually “you look very nice.” Their tone was always respectful and supportive, the exact thing that Nice Guys everywhere are imagining when they defend the idea of complimenting women on the street. But here’s the thing: that supportive tone was insidious. Because the clearly implied prefix was, “Don’t worry, you look very nice.” And I hadn’t been worried, hadn’t been thinking about it at all, right up until they said something.

To say it ruined the final product would be hyperbole, but it was certainly detrimental. You have to be in a weird headspace to pull off something as egotistical as a photo shoot, because thinking about it too much inevitably reveals how ludicrous the whole thing is. Personally, I find it’s best to convince myself that I’m playing a part. It’s not me vainly pushing my hair around to the grim rhythms of a camera shutter, I’m just performing the role of a model in a photo shoot, see? So it’s totally accurate and definitely not weird that I touched my jaw and made “I have a secret” eyes at an expensive chunk of plastic and glass just then, because it’s what a real model would do. You can’t have imposter syndrome if your whole plan was to impost in the first place.

But at no point did the question of beauty enter into it. Willem Dafoe’s headshots are not meant to make him beautiful, they are meant to make him look like he knows what the fuck he’s doing—and for the first few pictures, I did. Then a stranger effectively told me, “You are correct to be this vain,” and it all started to fall apart. They weren’t talking to the model, they were talking to me, offering judgment I never asked for. In their minds, the confident woman secretly needed their approval, and their patronizing remarks threw me out of character and reminded me again and again how silly the whole endeavor was.

And believe me, I’m aware that all this dithering only proves that I was insecure and did want their support as a fellow human—but not for my waist-to-hip ratio or facial symmetry. I wanted them to take me seriously. Silence would have been an acknowledgement that I was doing just fine without them. Complimenting me was like sidling up to the emperor in his new clothes and admiring his sexy abs: sure, it sounds like a nice thing to say, but it reveals him as naked all the same.

Long story short, my backbone lost a vertebrae with each passing appraisal, and the (female) photographer’s pointed suggestion that we move somewhere else couldn’t save me. The photos weren’t bad, but most of them betrayed an undercurrent of fear and/or apology—AKA the standard face of a woman who has been forced into self-conscious deflection in order to protect her emotional or physical safety.

Clearly, my dad didn’t see the same thing I did, or maybe he was so used to it he thought it was just my face. Maybe my friends saw it, or maybe they were only raising a fist against The Man and his oppressive portraiture norms. Probably it was all in my own head. But at the end of the day, I didn’t want my official photo to be one that made me feel bad. So I chose the youthfully ironic, self-aware option, the one that laughed openly about my mannequin arms, and leaned against the wall as if to say, “Oh, this wood? You’re goddamn right it’s dilapidated.”

Kitchen Insubstantial

Sun, 26 Aug 2018 16:49:06 -0500

We’ve all heard the anecdote. “This crappy toaster gave out after just two years—meanwhile, my grandmother’s Bakelite from 1960 still works just as well as the day she bought it!” “I found this great old blender at a garage sale. It’s lasted longer than our previous three combined!” Say it with me now… They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.

Here’s the thing, though: they do. If anything, they make them better than they used to. What these cantankerous grumblemonkeys always fail to consider is the astronomical price that Granny had to pay for her everlasting chrome miracles. Take, for example, this “good old days” entry from a kitchen appliance catalogue:

Given all of the high-tech features Kenmore crammed into their fancy new toaster—cushioned pop-up and no ticking, you guys!—$21 sounds like a downright bargain… right up until you feed it into the 2018 inflation machine, and are presented with a bill for just over $208.

“But Jennifer,” you protest, “I would gladly pay $208 for a toaster that lasted!” Ah, but you can. The key search term here is commercial. Restaurants don’t have time to mess around with faulty equipment, and the market for commercial-grade products remains a thriving one. Even a quick perusal of Amazon’s current listings proves that the majority of high-quality, decades-lasting, and, yes, solid-chrome wonders still cost less than half of what your ancestors paid.

Now, here’s the flip side of that argument. In 2009, I bought a commercial waffle iron for around $150, and it still works like new. But I make waffles a lot. While your average family is wistfully envisioning how a Sunday morning cornucopia would cement their love for one another and guarantee that Junior will pay for a good nursing home when the time comes, I stand alone in the kitchen once a month making a regiment’s worth of waffles that will barely have time to solidify in the freezer before they disappear like they’re at the Battle of Stalingrad. My needs are utilitarian and intense, while everyone else’s are largely a marketing-driven fantasy. Put bluntly, you’re going to use that waffle maker twice, and you know it. You’re taking a bath on the financials either way, so you might as well make it a footbath and waste $30 on a crappy waffle iron instead of $150 on a proper one.

Let’s even imagine, for the sake of argument, that you’ll use it religiously—perhaps your teen daughter has announced she’s converting to Santeria, and you know it’s just another obsession sparked by a crush on some boy that’ll all blow over when she realizes he’s been texting Olivia behind her back, but you want to be a supportive parent so you open-mindedly grit your teeth and suggest that celebrating Eleguá on the 3^rd day of every month might very well consist of a decadent, syrup-based breakfast—thus causing your pisspoor waffle iron to die in under a year. You would still have to keep up the habit for four more years before you’d spend $150 on successively broken waffle irons, and by then, she’ll have gone vegan anyway.

The moral of the story is: you get what you pay for… and that’s okay. Yes, my $400 industrial blender has never let me down in six years of near-constant use, but you don’t need that level of reliability. If you did, trust me, you’d already own one. Don’t shake your fist at the cheap factories that turn out pieces of junk—instead, point your finger and laugh at Granny, who had to shell out a week’s salary for something she stuck in the back of the cabinet and never used, either.

Lingua Franca

Wed, 20 Jun 2018 17:16:12 -0500

When I was 15, I learned how to speak Tex-Mex.

Note: if your borderline-racism alarm just went off, rest assured that the professional linguists in the audience are already flexing their “actually” fingers in defense of pidgin dialects. I do love a good bout of academic pugilism, but in this case, you’re both wrong: Tex-Mex involves no jargon or otherwise novel vocabulary, nor is it a pointedly glib statement on cultural assimilation. At best, you could say it’s a proto-patois.

Anyway, the handy thing about Tex-Mex is that any fluent speaker of English or Spanish can learn it in approximately sixty seconds. Honestly, it’s closer to ten, but you’ll need the other fifty to overcome your disbelief. I certainly did.

My Spanish education began in Kindergarten (gracias, cushy Lutheran school,) took a hiatus from 3rd through 6th (chíngate, standardized-test-loving public school,) then picked up again in 7th (joder sí, urban middle school, whose first-generation immigrants taught me all the best swears.) The point is, by the time I took my first job at Domino’s Pizza I was moderately fluent—enough to take down an address and rattle off crust and topping choices, at any rate. We had a few bilingual drivers, but I was the only insider who could speak Spanish, which made me proud but also a little bummed. I hated to think about the roughly 1-in-20 phone customers getting turned away on my days off.

Then one Friday night, we were insanely busy. A bunch of people had called in sick, and it was just me and the owner getting slammed. I was on the ovens, pulling four pizzas at a time off the double-wide, double-decker conveyor belts, while my boss was running up and down the prep line throwing Molotov cocktails of pepperoni and furiously spinning dough like an air bender resenting his day job. (Also, this was summer in Texas, where middle-of-the-night temps are enough to break a sweat, and a pair of 500-degree ovens trumps one A/C unit every time. State law requires certain declarations to be displayed prominently in every business, and one of my coworkers had cheerfully highlighted the prohibition of child labor under extreme conditions such as “temperatures over 100 degrees.” We had a good laugh.)

Anyway, as the phone rang for the millionth time that night, my boss threw his dough in the air and stabbed the speaker button mid-flight like some kind of badass. No time to hold a handset, buddy, we got pizzas to make!

“Dominospizzawhatcannagetcha?” he yelled out, dough landing neatly on his fists. And through the flour-dusted haze came that familiar question:

“Ehhh… speaka Spaneesh?”

My boss and I had one of those shared moments where time stands still—like he realizes he’s holding a live grenade, and he turns to look at me, eyes pleading, and all I can do is give him a panicked, slow-motion “noooooo….!” because I’ve already got two pizzas in my hands, and we both know that if I come take the call from him, pies are going to start falling off the conveyor belt. Lives will be lost.

So he gives me a grim General Patton nod, like “you take care of yourself, kid.” And that brave man turned back around, leaned in gently toward the speaker, and said, “Heeey, whashoowant, mang?”

My eyes bulged as I hissed, “What the fuck are you doing, dude?!” (A full socio-contextual translation of which might have been, “You can’t get away with that shit on the southside, pendejo, you’re going to get us both killed!”) But he urged patience, holding up one finger as I held my breath.

Finally, the guy on the other end sighed. “Hokay, hokay, bueno. Keeyero oona peeza gronday…”

And he gave his whole order in Spanish, but with a cartoonish American accent, while my boss asked him all the appropriate questions in horrifying, Speedy Gonzales English—and I’ll be goddamned if they didn’t both understand every single word. What started out looking like incitement to homicide turned into the kind of scene only an advertising executive could dream up: just two men in soft focus, finding a way to set aside their differences for the common goal of diabetes for all.

“How did you know that would work?” I asked after he’d hung up.

He shrugged. “Everybody speaks Tex Mex.”

And now you do, too.

Story Time: Put Me in the Zoo

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 12:58:03 -0500

Every writer knows the importance of the opening sentence. It’s, like, in the Top Ten of narrative elements, at least. No, five; I’ll go five—as long as the rest are sufficiently vague, like “plot” and “character development.” Clearly I’m not every writer, though, or else I would have ditched this soft-opening quagmire and gone straight for the jugular:

I was once detained at a zoo on suspicion of poaching. No, not eggs, animals.

It’s a good line, right? And it’s completely true! Now, I could, at this point, relay the cascade of events leading up to my detention in at least marginally chronological order—a classic flashback bookended by non-sequitur intrigue on the left and totally-sequitur resolution on the right. But I detest even the hint of an “X Hours Earlier”-type placard, and besides, it’s important to inspire empathy with your antagonists. So, we’ll start from the zookeepers’ perspective instead. Their prima facie evidence against the co-defendants—me and my partner in not-crime, that is—was our guns. Once they saw those, the prosecution pretty much rested.

Now, first off, let me just say that this zoo was in Texas, and random firearms are not as out-of-place here as one might hope. Secondly, this was back in 2002—no way would we have been stupid enough to do this sort of thing today. Columbine was still an anomaly back then, and the term “active shooter” didn’t even exist. I told this story at parties for over a decade before the assumption that we were poachers started to look like an under- instead of an overreaction.

Still, it was illogical. I mean, it’s not like we were brandishing our weapons at the hyenas. We were just walking around, nonchalantly carrying them all in a giant duffel bag. (Yes, seriously. Different. Times.) What’s more, we weren’t even inside the main part of the zoo. We were on a little road that wrapped around the back of the property, behind all the animal enclosures where nobody could see us—we thought.

All of a sudden, this white golf cart comes zooming around the bend, with one of the three zookeepers standing and holding onto the rail as if the situation left no time for any of that sitting nonsense. They pulled up short and yelled at us to stop, then one of them whipped out their only means of defense between the three of them: a walkie-talkie.

“Get Sean* down to the southwest perimeter,” he said. “We got a couple of poachers.”

I snorted, which was probably not the best thing to do. Meanwhile, my co-worker started trying to explain our situation to them, which was also ill-advised, because he was British and everyone knows the one with the accent is the bad guy.

“The thing is,” said Andy, “we work for a video game company, and right now we’re making a first-person shooter. And in the game, when you run out of bullets, you drop your gun and pick up another one. And in the interest of realism, we want to hear the weapon hitting the ground as you discard it in favor of something that will better meet your massacring needs.” (He didn’t really describe it that way.) “So you see, here in the bag we have one of each type of murdering utensil in the game, and we need to drop them one at a time on each possible floor surface, in a sort of auditory butchery matrix, if you will.” (Again, paraphrasing.)

“And I don’t know if you know this,” Andy continued, a little too eagerly, “but you all are sitting on a gold mine of foley surfaces, all in one place. I mean, it’s very convenient for us! You’ve got rock, grass, gravel, sand, solid wood, metal grating—and you’re very far back from the highway, so there’s no background noise.”

All of which was true, and might have been a reasonable explanation—except the entire time he was trying to sell it, the animals in their cages were roaring, and cawing, and making all this noise… almost as if someone were trying to kill them.

Anyway, we soon got the situation cleared up: first, we showed them our business cards, and then, they banned us from the zoo for life. They forgot my face, though; I’ve been back there since with my kids. And all things considered, I have to admit that the zookeepers were way more understanding than the girl scout troop in the woods who called the cops on us later that week.

*I have no idea what the guy’s real name was. But it sounded like the kind of name you’d find in the upper echelons of zoo management, like Sean or Chuck or Tyler.

You’re Wrong About Hamilton

Sat, 06 Jan 2018 18:35:08 -0600

Man, could I have come up with a more clickbaity title for this post? (To be honest, yes, I could. “The Top 8 Reasons Why You’re Wrong About Hamilton,” perhaps, or “Lin-Manuel Miranda Can’t Stand This Texas Mom.”) Anyway, like all clickbait, I’ve attempted to sucker you in with an emotional response that won’t be supported by the text. You are right—assuming you’re one of the musical’s bajillion fans—that Hamilton is incredible. What you’re wrong about is why it is incredible.

Yes, the lyrics are inspired, and the melodies are heartrendingly cyclical, and the thematic mise-en-scene is nothing short of a Marshall McLuhan wet dream. But in the end, the true power of any story comes down to the emotional hook, which gets its barb not from suspense, or pain, or triumph, but from human relatability. Weakness in times of struggle, cowardice in the face of danger, base temptation when everything is on the line.

Nearly every moment in the show is one of these, from Hamilton’s inability to “say no to this,” to Burr’s fear of orphaning his daughter, to Washington’s need to “be real a second, for just a millisecond.” But to me, the best example comes near the beginning of Act I, just as Hamilton is joining up with his new crew.

HAMILTON:
Give me a position, show me where the ammunition is!
—Oh, am I talking too loud?
Sometimes I get overexcited, shoot off at the mouth.
I never had a group of friends before
I promise that I’ll make y’all proud.

LAURENS:
Let’s get this guy in front of a crowd!

Cue the enthusiastic chorus about not throwing away one’s shot. Hamilton’s little aside does nothing to advance the plot, and its characterization is in frank opposition to the rest of the song, which is about what a revolutionary badass he is. Everyone else on stage basically ignores his moment of apologetic self-deprecation. But we see it. And don’t doubt that it’s important—whole songs, equal in lyric brilliance to the rest of the work, had to be cut for length and pacing. Yet this stark interruption stayed in, because Lin-Manuel Miranda knows how to compose a hook.

But I’ll not rest on just one example, oh no! Let’s take an even more direct comparison: Battlestar Galactica and Titanic. (I know, but stay with me here.) In the latter, smarmy Cal escapes onto a lifeboat by effectively kidnapping a small child and claiming, “Please, I’m all she has in the world.” In the 2004 remake of Battlestar Galactica, there is a similar scene in which only a few refugees can fit onto a ship leaving a doomed planet. They draw numbers, and accidental-turncoat Gaius Baltar tricks a blind woman into giving him her winning ticket. Both men are ruled by self-preservation, but Cal is played—both in this scene and throughout his story—as a one-dimensional villain. He is arrogant and entitled, with a sheen of cruelty. Baltar, on the other hand, is portrayed as a coward. He dithers over his transgressions, and frequently switches sides. His face is full of self-loathing as he steals the woman’s number, while Cal is busy calculating the next step in his lie, should it come to that.

I mean no discredit to Billy Zane; it’s how the character was written and how he was directed to play it. But it explains why everybody hates—yet also largely forgets—Cal, and why Gaius Baltar still enjoys legions of sympathetic fans long after the show’s end, despite having a hand, multiple times, in the widespread death and destruction of the human race.

Imagine, instead, this scene for Cal: decades after his safe arrival on shore, he is on his deathbed, lovingly cared for by his adult daughter. Unable to withstand the guilt any longer, he admits that she is not his biological child, but rather a tool he used to escape a sinking ship so long ago. He attempted to redeem himself by raising her as his own, but there’s no way to know who her parents were, whether they died on the ship, whether they would have lived but stayed behind looking for her—or whether, in all likelihood, she would have died with them, and is only here today doing good in the world because of his weakness.

It doesn’t make him a good guy. But it hurts to think about, just a little bit, the way a hook should. Now go back through Hamilton, and try to count all the times that the good guys falter and the bad guys have at least a partial moral justification. You’ll run out of fingers and toes. (While you’re at it, go watch all of Battlestar Galactica, and use up your friends’ fingers and toes, too.)

Talk Small To Me

Thu, 28 Dec 2017 14:47:44 -0600

I try. I really do.

I know—and agree!—that polite chitchat serves a quantifiable social purpose, and when I’m on solid footing I’m pretty good at it. I also fall off a cliff when something catches me off guard, or the conversation turns out to have a hidden depth of meaning that I somehow overlooked, but that’s a failure of my brain, not the medium.

What I can’t deal with, however, is small talk that is an obvious lie. I don’t mean that I “can’t deal” in an Instagram-latte-I-can’t-even kind of way; I mean it throws me off the aforementioned cliff as surely as if you’d suddenly announced at the dinner party that you have genital cancer. My face goes slack while my inner thoughts tailspin on the question of whether you were actually making fun of me just then.

I could turn this into a childhood bullying confessional, and try to draw a line of causation between all those missed social cues and my hypervigilance for them now. But I don’t honestly think I’m all that paranoid about people making fun of me. I just don’t understand how anyone could expect to get away with some of the lines I’ve been fed, and if they weren’t lying sincerely—that is, genuinely believing that I would believe their lie—then sarcasm is the only remaining interpretation.

I feel like we need an example.

So, I was grocery shopping—wait, let me back up. For those who don’t know, my kids are on a special diet for gastrointestinal disease, and I have to cook 95% of their food from scratch. No joke, I have to make my own mayonnaise. So I tend to cook, and therefore buy, in bulk. Among other things, I get ground chicken 18 pounds at a time, which I have to call and order in advance because it’s so dang much. Okay, now you’re up to speed.

So, I’m loading these giant blocks of meat onto the conveyor belt, and the cashier’s trying to make small talk. And he said exactly what they always say, which is, “Wow, you having a barbecue or something?”

And I said what I always say: “Actually, it’s for my son. He really likes these little chicken patties I make, and it’s just easier to cook a whole bunch and then freeze them.” Hooray, social bond established, tribe strengthened, we can move on.

But this guy wasn’t done. “Oh, that’s really interesting. How do you make them?”

“Well, actually, I blend it up with a little water, because it gives it that fake chicken nugget texture? And then I just plop the batter out like a pancake, and bake it in the oven.”

“Do you use any seasonings or anything?” he asked.

“Nope, just meat in a blender.”

He gave a slow, profound nod. “Oh, that sounds delicious.”

Now, this is objectively false. It neither sounds, nor is, delicious. (Valid counter-argument: my son seems to like them. Devastating rejoinder: he smothers them with honey.) And I don’t mind being teased; I love trash talking. But if I respond with something like, “Your mom sounds delicious,” it will inevitably turn out that the stranger was just being polite, and now I’m the jerk. Jennifer, meet cliff; cliff, Jennifer. I mean, he can’t actually think that pureed meat—cooked baby food, essentially—sounds delicious. More to the point, he can’t actually think that I would believe that he would think that, can he? Yet the cashier’s face is smirk-free, and he’s staring at me waiting for a response, and I just can’t tell what kind of personal interaction is supposed to be going on here at 8:30 AM on a Tuesday in the checkout lane of the Whole Foods Market.

So I consciously chose to take him at his word. Either he genuinely thinks it sounds delicious, or he genuinely thinks I’m a rube. But then, I can’t let the latter slide by unopposed. If he’s being whatever passes for honest in his world, then I have to be, too.

So I said, “Oh no, they’re completely bland and gross. But he’s got kid taste buds, so he doesn’t know any better.” Ha, see? I am good at this small talk thing! I was factual, but gave him an out for being wrong, and blamed it all on a third party who wasn’t there to defend himself. That’s how it’s done!

But then he said what people always say when they find out my kids are on a pain-in-the-ass diet, which was, “Well, at least it’s super healthy, right?”

And once again, I’m over the cliff. Seriously? It’s chicken. I mean, yeah, it doesn’t have any preservatives or crap in it, but is that the line now? I deserve a compliment because I fed my kid the main ingredient in dog food? Or are you just driving the disdain home even farther, since I obviously didn’t pick up on the fact that you were making fun of me the first time?

Anyway, the moral of the story is, I’d prefer it if you were just mean. At least I know how to handle that.

Stop Calling It “Screen Time”

Sat, 11 Nov 2017 10:58:09 -0600

There are few phrases in the English language that annoy me as much as “screen time.” It belongs to that special class of bigotry that is so grossly imprecise, it can’t even be classified as a proper -ism because it targets the majority. It’s a prejudice without any juris, a bias with no slant, a dogma whose rejection is so universal that it might as well be feline. To claim that every pixel is the same is to say that Shakespeare is equal to Playboy because they’re both printed on paper. It’s ridiculous.

The better distinction is one of content. I’d rather my children play a good video game than read a bad book, and I’d positively insist that they watch a movie instead of running around outside playing a game of, for example, “Smear the Queer.” (If you’re not familiar with this playground staple of yesteryear, be glad. If you are, then you understand my point that not all forms of exercise offer a net benefit.) Of course there are good books, and there are good ways to get physical exercise, and my family engages in both regularly. I am not arguing that “screen time” should be placed above rather than below; I’m saying it’s a meaningless category that shouldn’t exist at all.

Similarly, the rationalization that “we only let them watch things that are educational” makes me only slightly less furious. It almost always indicates a misunderstanding of what learning really is—and I say this as someone who worked for an educational software company for a while. My coworkers in that office were smart, dedicated people, who loved children and thought technology made just the neatest window dressing. They didn’t get it. And why should they? Gaming wasn’t their profession. Their flaw was not an ignorance of technology’s strengths—which they certainly had—but rather the hubris of thinking that, hey, anybody could do it.

The truth is that a kid will practice far more math skills playing an RPG with complicated stats management than he’ll ever get from a “fun math games” website that took a flash programmer 20 minutes to develop. Then there is learning outside the three Rs to take into account, like social interaction and awareness. I firmly believe that my children are better served by a co-op video game—in which they have to evaluate and rely on each other’s skills, and learn both the verbal and emotional components of teamwork—than some hapless kid who isn’t allowed to have her own screens, but is constantly learning through Mommy’s example how to measure her self-worth in terms of likes.

It’s true that I grew up playing games, and that has surely had an influence. But a large part of my position here actually stems from a demonstration I saw during my freshman year of college. Several of the classes in the Radio-TV-Film curriculum were required of all students, regardless of whether we were budding directors, screenwriters, sound techs, or otherwise. So, by way of introduction, professors would often go around the room on the first day and ask about our focus within the major. On this particular occasion, the professor ended the exercise with an oddly smug declaration.

“Okay. You’ve told me why you think you’re here,” he said. “Now, I’m going to tell you why you’re really here.” He peered over the room expectantly. “Raise your hand if you were not allowed to watch television as a child.”

Roughly 85% of the hands in the room went up. Everyone looked around in shock, because I guess they’d all been thinking they were the only one. (Full disclosure: I was not allowed to watch TV for several years at my mother’s house. But that didn’t start until I was nine, and I spent the majority of my time at my dad’s house, where the TV was on constantly. I’m as much a victim of subconscious conditioning as anybody else; I’m just saying my own reasons for being there emerged from a different set of animal instincts.)

“That’s right,” our professor crooned, an edge of triumph in his voice. “And it’s too late for you. But I want you to remember this, for when you have kids. Understand that if you forbid them something that society deems generally acceptable, all you’ve done is plant the seed for their obsession.”

So yeah, I think that if you want your kid to become a professional game tester, then by all means, severely limit their screen time. See how that works out.

I do not, incidentally, mean that addiction should be allowed to flourish. Obsessions of any kind are bad, whether it’s digital or emotional or gustatory or anything else. The overall skill we all have to master is self-regulation, and when you completely cut children off, they’re not learning it. They’re just twitching within your artificial chains, salivating for a chance at freedom. The phrase, “Okay, I’ve had enough of this, it’s time for something else,” doesn’t just magically come with age. It takes real practice, and a level of involvement on the parents’ part. Maybe the obsessive tendencies are so bad that it has to start with just one minute at a time, and when the kid can successfully walk away from that without a fit, the parents can inch it up to two minutes—whatever it takes. But successful integration must be the long-term goal, or else you’re just setting them up to binge the moment you’re not around. The bigger the wall, the more gruesome the high-dive is off the top.

And I know it’s tough being a generation on the edge. Many parents have never gotten comfortable with new media, and gnash their teeth at the thought of playing their kids’ video game for ten minutes just to understand what it’s really like. But you have to. You have to be involved in the content they’re consuming, and avoid the temptation to cop out through format bans. Before you know it, you’ll be forming a family team on Rocket League and having the time of your life.

Brevity = Wit

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 08:45:20 -0500

The first time I met Mr. Fear, I hated him.

This is not a hackneyed metaphor, nor is it a “Hiro Protagonist” kind of situation. Mr. Fear was a real high school English teacher, and that was his real name. We also had a Mr. Read and a Mr. Kuhl (“cool”) at the same school, and for a brief time a student teacher from the university whose name was also Fiehr, pronounced in the way you would expect given that I’m bringing it up here. We were practically a Louis Sachar book.

Mr. Fear was painfully awkward, and had zero control of our freshman class despite a decade of teaching experience. He crushed his authoritative standing even further by sharing overly-personal anecdotes, such as the fact that he’d been stood up at the altar twice, and had made multiple overnight recordings of himself snoring. At one point he gave out his home phone number to the class, apparently unable to foresee the prank calls that would ensue—then angrily complained about them, thus guaranteeing that the harassment would continue for weeks on end. Of course I never took part in it myself, but I also had no pity for him. As far as I was concerned, the situation was entirely his own fault.

My junior year, I ended up with Mr. Fear on my schedule again, but my dread turned out to be unfounded. Perhaps it was because we were older, or just a better assortment of human beings overall, but for whatever reason the demeanor of the room jumped instantly from middle school to college. Without the behavior problems to distract him, I was finally able to get a sense of how smart (if still incredibly foolish in some arenas) Mr. Fear really was.

He knew all of Shakespeare by heart. All of it. If we were good and had a few minutes left at the end of class, he would let us play a game where we opened to any page in his Complete Works of Shakespeare, and read out one line. Not a line in the theatrical sense, but one visual line of text, usually about ten words. He would tell us the character, play, act, and scene; then sometimes recite the section surrounding it for good measure. I never once saw him get it wrong.

But the point at which he really started to grow on me was when he declared that we weren’t going to read The Great Gatsby like all the other junior English classes. He had great appreciation for other classics like Lord of the Flies and The Scarlet Letter, but thought Gatsby was utter crap, for reasons I couldn’t understand. Instead, he said, we were going to learn how to write. Someone moaned about how we already knew the standard “In this essay I will show A, B, and C” regurgitations, and he nearly had an apoplectic fit.

After a few deep breaths, he picked up his chalk and wrote on the board, “Brevity = Wit.” Some of us got the joke, and for the rest he explained that it meant everything was better shorter. Everything, always. The only trick, he said, was not to lose any meaning when you shortened your sentence.

Then he started pulling examples from what I assumed were random academic papers, but I now think might have been written by former college professors he still held grudges against. (This was another personal tale of woe he had shared with us: how he had achieved all-but-dissertation status on his doctorate, but the politics of academia had conspired to keep him from finishing it.) They all went something like this sentence that I ganked from PubMed for illustrative purposes:

“Recent advances, for example, in the discovery of the genomic landscape of the disease, in the development of assays for genetic testing and for detecting minimal residual disease, as well as in the development of novel anti-leukemic agents, prompted an international panel to provide updated evidence- and expert opinion-based recommendations.”

50 words, and an eyesore. Then Mr. Fear would start pointing out redundancies: you can’t “make an advance in” a discovery or development; the discovery/development is the advancement. Minimal and residual in this case are synonyms. A development is inherently novel. In the case of a medical panel, the recommendations are assumed to be based on evidence and expert opinions. Genetic tests already prove the existence of genomic knowledge. “X prompted Y to provide” is longer than “Y provided after X”. Bit by bit, the sentence would shrink.

“An international panel of leukemia experts updated their recommendations for diagnosis and treatment in the wake of successful genomic mapping, assays to detect residual disease, and new anti-leukemic agents.”

29 words, and clarity.

While the other teachers lectured on the symbolism of green lights, Mr. Fear spent six weeks straight on “densifying” sentences, and by the end I’d learned more about writing than all the rest of my English education combined. I don’t know for sure, because I never did read it, but in retrospect I think he probably slipped in more than one sentence from The Great Gatsby for us to improve. My God, did he hate that book.

Mountain Climbing

Wed, 08 Feb 2017 00:02:00 -0600

If you had told me in my youth that I would someday be an expert in special diets and nutrition, I would have laughed. In fact, I would have gone out of my way to prove you wrong—and I know this, because it is exactly what I did when it happened.

I went to a large high school in central Austin. We were a diverse group of students overall, but the roughly half of us who were college-bound were very college-bound. The parents in our city possessed degrees at nearly twice the national average, supported the arts enough to earn the moniker “Live Music Capital of the World,” and fought tooth-and-nail political battles over the endangered status of blind salamanders. My senior year, the parents at my school in particular bullied the principal into creating a Shakespeare class out of thin air, simply because a few of us wanted one. Austin is a city that embraces education for activism, and activism for education. So it was no surprise when my classmates and I were offered not only standard collegiate counseling in our senior year, but also on-site visits from various campus representatives, excused absences for as many college visits as we wanted, and even a comprehensive personality and skills test to help us determine what major or degree we might be ideally prodded toward.

The first time I took this test, almost 200 questions in all, the computer screen calmly informed me that I was best suited to be a nutritionist. I remember it clearly because I did not just disagree with my digital assessor; I was downright offended. I was going to be an engineer, I thought, or maybe an economist. Even at my most frivolous, I was going to major in Radio-Television-Film and become a sound designer for movies or videogames. (As it turned out, frivolity ruled the day and this was the path I chose, until life chose a different one for me.) But a nutritionist? The idea was absurd. I didn’t even like food. The whole concept of eating was a chore to me. If I could have taken a daily pill and never had to eat again, I would have signed up for that in a heartbeat.

These programs were so stupid, I told myself. There was no way they could get a comprehensive picture of a nuanced human being with a list of vague questions. Watch, I thought, I’ll go change a couple of my answers, and the next thing you know it’ll be telling me I’m destined to be a lumberjack. So I went back and adjusted a few choices I’d been on the fence about.

Click submit. Congratulations! You are best suited to the career of: Nutritionist.

I changed a few more answers. Click submit. Congratulations! You are best suited to the career of: Nutritionist.

I went all the way back to the beginning, and changed every answer I could while still maintaining any semblance of honesty. I mean, sure, get me on the right day and I could conceivably enjoy working outdoors for a few minutes… Click. Freaking. Submit.

Congratulations! You are best suited to the career of: Nutritionist.

“This thing’s broken,” I told my friend beside me. “The only answer it gives anyone is nutritionist.”

“It told me college professor,” she said with a shrug. “Sounds right to me.”

“Yeah, I got actuary,” said the boy on the other side of me. “I don’t even know what that is, but it says it’s all about math, so that part’s true at least.”

“Whatever. The whole thing is dumb,” I thought to myself for the next decade.

Despite the complete lack of nutrition courses in the Radio-TV-Film curriculum, college began exposing me to the concept of cooking—and my profound inadequacy in that department—almost immediately. My new boyfriend, let’s call him Ibram, came from a family with strong culinary traditions, and he had somehow managed to first absorb and then maintain these, even as a college bachelor living with four other guys. He and his roommates held a weekly Sunday dinner event at their house just off campus, wherein they would cook large, complex meals for groups of ten or more. The recipes for these meals were often requested directly from the chefs at their favorite restaurants, because apparently that is a thing you can do if you are young and bold enough. The cosmopolitan vibe was admittedly diminished by the multiple porch-couches, uneven pool table, rusting clawfoot tub, and wall holes covered with ill-fitting pieces of painted plywood, but… that just made it bohemian, man. As a freshman, I felt lucky to be given a shortcut into the inner circle.

One morning shortly after we began dating, Ibram informed me that he was going to make pancakes. He said it so casually though, not as a grand romantic gesture, or even as if it were for my sake at all. I’m honestly not sure he initially intended to share them, any more than a normal person would expect to share a bowl of cereal. He was just making pancakes because it was time for breakfast, and that’s what one did.

He tossed ingredients into a bowl with such ennui that I almost didn’t understand what was happening. He glanced at me before not-measuring, in what I understood to be some magic appraisal of how much raw material I would be consuming, but then made a point of mentioning that his solid-steel vintage stovetop percolator could only make coffee for one. I told him that was fine since I didn’t drink coffee, but I tried really hard to make it sound like an active dismissal, like I was too cool for even the cool-kid stuff.

The batter was ready in two minutes, tops, and he poured expert circles from the bowl directly into the pan, not spilling a drop. So far nothing had been dirtied except the bowl, the pan, and a single fork. And, of course, his percolator.

“So how do you know when to flip them?” I asked, trying to appear interested in his hobby like girlfriends are supposed to.

He looked up at me like he’d made a huge mistake. Then he seemed to consider that maybe I was making a dumb joke. Then he nodded in resignation, apparently deciding that my other qualities would outweigh this profound defect, for now. “When the bubbles rise up through the top,” he replied gently, after his face had finished going through its subtle emotional contortions.

Then he lightly tossed a few fresh blackberries into each puddle of batter. Where the hell did the blackberries come from? I didn’t even know.

“Whoa,” I blurted out. “I bet that’ll be really good.”

“Yeah,” he said with a weak smile, as if I were a dying comrade who didn’t comprehend just how bad the wound was. Yeah, buddy. We’ll go see the mountains when we get back, you betcha.

Despite his doubts, I eventually saw the mountains. And he was right, they weren’t that impressive after all. Practically molehills.

Letters to the Editor

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 08:38:32 -0600

Back in high school I performed in an improv comedy troupe (this did not make me one of the “cool kids,” I assure you, but it did make me one of the “happy kids.”) One of the more conceptually complicated games we used to play on stage was called What Are You Doing? Part of the bit was we’d explain it upsettingly fast to the audience, and then we’d assure them that it would make sense once they saw it. Here’s how it worked:

Person A: What are you doing?
Person B: Painting the house.
Person A: [mimes painting the house]

…

Person B: What are you doing?
Person A: [while still miming house painting] Feeding the dog.
Person B: [mimes feeding the dog]

…

Person A: What are you doing?
Person B: Mowing the lawn.
Person A: [switches from house painting to lawn mowing]

…

Person B: What are you doing?
Etc., etc.

The trick was 1.) constantly coming up with new activities, which is harder than it sounds after a few rounds, 2.) trying to pick activities that would torture your opponent, like “spinning in circles” or “standing on my head,” and 3.) not getting confused and naming an activity that was a reasonable facsimile to the activity you were already doing—imagine, for example, Person A gave me “driving a car,” and I begin moving my hands in that limited back-and-forth circle shape, and then when they ask me what I’m doing I respond, “Milking a cow.” You see how the hand gestures are basically the same? So it’s a test of “do two things at once” plus “don’t run out of ideas” plus maybe a little “punish your friend for no good reason.”

But here’s where it gets interesting. After a few rounds of free form activity-naming, the host would declare that it was time to up the ante, and ask for someone in the audience to give us their initials. From then on, all the activities had to start with those initials. If it was some guy named Steve Johnson, we’d be “slapping jackrabbits” and “slipping jovially” and “slinky juggling” and “slightly jittering.” The longer we went on, the more wildly the audience cheered our apparent abundance of creativity.

What they didn’t know is that it actually becomes much easier once the initials get involved. Try it: name as many activities as you can in rapid succession, and see how long it takes before you start faltering. Then constrain yourself slightly, in any fashion—you could use initials, or you could name only activities you do in the winter, or only activities involving food—and see how much farther you get. It’s like putting your thumb over the garden hose: a more focused flow travels faster and farther. It’s frankly factual, friends. Fallaciousness forbidden.

(Forgive me.)

Sometimes people like to say that they need (or worse, have to wait for) “inspiration.” But inspiration is really just another form of narrowing down your options, by putting yourself inside whatever constraints pass for inspiring in your mind. So instead, be like the British lepidopterist William Stephen Adkinson. Wade shin-deep in the absurdly arbitrary instead of wafting about seeking the annoyingly artistic. You might be stunned at what you come up with.

What the Hell Is a Garret, Anyway?

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 07:28:04 -0500

There are rules for garrets, you know. Such as: only artists may use them, and the only activity allowed inside one is “toiling.” Except if you believe that, you’re a moron, because this notion is outdated—or so I’m repeatedly told. The only thing I’ve ever heard about garrets, in fact, is how my notions of them are wrong, despite a complete lack of said notions in the first place.

If one googles toiling away in his garret, the first three pages of results include 3 original usages from the late 1800s to early 1900s, 8 genuine usages from recent years, and 12 assurances that we don’t do that kind of thing anymore, meaning that at this point it is more cliché to point out how cliché it is. Adjust the search to “away in his garret” -toiling, and you get a few more approved activities: slaving (4), hiding (2), pining (2), and one each for struggling, scratching, wasting, scrying, writing, slogging, scribbling, and daubing… as well as solid testimonials on the effectiveness of their doors: locked (4), stowed (4), tucked (3), bolted, secreted, packed, shut. Again, there are at least as many insisting on the falsehood of these scenarios as there are describing them with sincerity.

The point is this (I know, you were waiting on tenterhooks¹): The most modern of all clichés is to point out how cliché things are, which I have now just done against my will. Like Heisenberg’s photons, you can’t acknowledge it without participating in it. David Foster Wallace had a number of things to say on this subject, anticipating that the next wave of culture would (or at least should) involve a rejection of irony and rejection itself, instead embracing earnestness and sincere admission without fear of ridicule. Then again, Wallace was also mentally ill in a number of ways, so grains of salt abound. Not to put too fine a point on it³, there are no rules for how writing gets done, and that includes how writing doesn’t get done. Lin-Manuel Miranda spent time locked away in a number of old historical places. Truman Capote routinely toiled away in a dingy motel room. A friend of mine sold his home and wrote in a van for a year, not from financial but from artistic need. Me, I do think I’d write more productively in something sufficiently garret-esque, but it’s not reconcilable with my current reality. I split what writing time I have about 40-40-20 between a big chair in my bedroom (when no one’s home,) the living room couch (when my night-shift husband’s still sleeping in the bedroom,) and the passenger seat of my car during my kids’ myriad extracurriculars. But I could see a garret working for me. Just get the work done in the way you want to get the work done. If you think garrets are cliché, obviously don’t rent one for the summer. Be all hip with your Macbook in a noisy coffeeshop, or write from a moving bicycle for all I care. But if you want to work in a garret, if garrets work for you psychologically, no one should discourage you. Just write, for crying out loud. Don’t waste your time writing about how other people should, or shouldn’t, be writing.⁴

¹I will refrain from following up this old-fashioned cliché that no one knows the meaning of anymore with “see what I did there?”… but only because that joke itself is now a decade old, and super cliché.²

²See what I did there?

³ibid.

⁴Oh for the love of…

Tragic Sans: Writing Humorously About Sad Things

Sun, 16 Oct 2016 23:00:11 -0500

On a humid Sunday evening not too many years back, a young woman in a bright, flirty dress bounced impatiently on her toes. The deceptively thin velveteen curtain only inches from her face was meant to create a false backstage, and everyone maintained the lie even though it hung only a few feet perpendicular to the cinder block wall and could be seen around easily by the left third of the room. The audience members pretended to be oblivious to the awkwardly poised performers on the brink of entrance, and the performers pretended there were enough people in the audience to be worth fractioning into thirds to begin with.

At the boom of her name, peaking the available output of the small amplifier, the young woman’s grin stretched a little wider and she shoved the curtain aside. Even low heels were a risk on the narrow steps strewn with loose cables, and the emcee’s perfunctory handshake served double duty as a safeguard against falling. He felt her tight grip and mercifully complied, making sure their binary orbit was complete before letting go.

“Hi, guys!” she chirped into the microphone, still warm from previous hands. Then in a single breath, “You’re all looking really good tonight I have two kids with autism.”

A gleeful pause, relishing the silent pain. Then finally… the release. “And if you ever want to know how to bring down a room, that is a good place to start.” Ah, the laughter. A palpable melting of the club that felt like a ten-meter-wide cloud of morphine. The next 3 minutes of self-eviscerating confession would be bliss.

***

I did stand up comedy for about a year. I used a false name, and almost no one in my real life knew I was doing it, let alone saw me perform. I played a recording once for my husband, but it was as uncomfortable as I thought it would be, and I never repeated the experiment. I wasn’t doing it for accolades, and I certainly wasn’t trying to make a career of it like most of the comics milling around the club. I was simply at a critical point of healing in my life, when it seemed the itch of flesh knitting back together was almost as horrific as the original injury had been, and performance had always been my go-to mechanism for relief for as long as I can remember.

I didn’t care that I was only passably successful at it, due in large part to the fact that I wasn’t really telling jokes. Usually after the show two or three people would make a point to come up to me, and none of them ever said I was funny. What they all said was that I was an amazing storyteller. The stories I told were funny, yes, but they were sad too, because I don’t really know how to separate the two. Once the host even told me in a sincere but baffled voice, “That was really good,” as if he couldn’t figure out what the hell he had just witnessed. We both knew I was in the wrong venue, but for now, this was the only place I could get my fix.

People often praise my ability to “find humor” in the circumstances of our lives, but it’s like playing hide and seek with a three-year-old. Humor is a giant giggling lump crouching behind a lamp stand, and I feel like everyone else in the world is emphatically calling out, “Now where did humor go? Under here? Nooooo…” Oh my God you guys, it’s right there! How can you not see it? But you can see it, I know you can. You’re just afraid to admit you see it. Or maybe you’ve even spent so long being afraid of it that you’ve truly stopped being able to see it. But the key to writing about touchy subjects with humor is not to be funny (or worse, to try hard to be funny.) It’s simply to be honest.

For some of us, being honest means just admitting the thing we find funny but were afraid to say. (Again, not the thing that we think will make other people laugh. This is where brash, shock-jock comedians get themselves in trouble, because they’ve settled too hard into the job. For the most part comedians’ jokes don’t actually make other comedians laugh, and they all know it. It’s why the phrase “comedians’ comedian” exists.) You’re looking for the thing that makes you, yourself, laugh. Often people with terminal diseases develop very dark senses of humor, but it’s not a new development. It’s only that they no longer care what other people think. Take the fleeting absurd thought you had, and don’t worry about whether people will think you’re a terrible person for making light of a sad situation. Just write it down and see what happens.

For others, the social construct is more established, and they will insist they really don’t find anything funny about a situation. If that’s you, then the answer is still to be honest, you just have more layers to dig through. Start with the thing you’re afraid of. The thing you hate. The horrible thing that you would only tell a therapist after half a bottle of wine, and put it on the page. See. What. Happens. I am terrified of dying, because I’ve never really believed in God and I don’t know what’s coming. I am afraid of my spouse leaving me, but only because it will mean my mother was right that I’m a failure. I regret having children and fantasize about my alternate future at least once a day. I truly, seriously want to murder my relative, preferably in a painful way. Anything and everything that makes you want to follow it up with, “but I swear I’m not a bad person!” Really practice being honest, and then when you’re ready, let just one person in your life see what you’ve written. Trust me, they won’t reject you. They will marvel at your honesty, and secretly wonder if maybe they could say some things out loud, too. Before long, you may notice that giggling huddle behind the lampstand. It was there the whole time, you just had the lights off.