The Big Thing

I’m resuscitating the dead art form of the blog. Or at least this blog for this post. If you don’t know what a blog is, it’s like a Substack but I’m not going to email you telling you I wrote something and then make you pay me $5 a month just for the honor of bothering you with my thoughts. Read it or don’t. TW: Death of a pet.

As an elder millennial, I feel my body aging while it’s still trying to heal from coming of age during the great recession, caught in a break-down build-up loop. I've spent a lot of time walking around my bougie neighborhood this week, trying to move the pain, the grief, the anger out of my body while I passed the $800,000 two bed ranch houses on an eighth of an acre that we’ll never afford, nestled neatly between the charter school and pricey coffee shop while I try to make sense of this new chapter in my life.

I had an idea of the landmarks I’d hit as an adult. I’d get a degree. Buy a house. Get married. Have kids. Have a career. Those things were mirages on the horizon for my generation, I just didn’t know it at the time.

So in 2011, when my degrees were getting me nowhere during the recession, and recruiters and HR mangers kindly told me to leave my degree off my resume and my husband -then-fiancee and I could barely make ends meet living in a badly insulated cabin in the merciless Adirondack winter, we got a puppy. Because we could. Because life is short. Be cause dogs are awesome.

People referred to Shakespeare as our “practice baby” which I found kind of insulting because I liked him a whole lot more than I liked the idea of having a baby. He was healthy for an English Bulldog. Hell, he was healthier than our neighbor’s golden lab. We drove from the Adirondacks to Saratoga the weekend of Sean’s 23rd birthday to pick him up. He lived twelve amazing years.

We drove home in the stark winter night, this small being that looked like Falcor from The Never Ending Story fast asleep in my lap, trusting us immediately and entirely. We almost ran out of gas 45 minutes from home. It was late at night in rural upstate New York and not even Stewart’s was open. We had to call the county Sheriff, who called one of the gas station managers to open the small one-pump station we’d pulled into so we could get enough gas to get home. Shakespeare slept in the crook of my arm the whole time. He didn’t realize his humans were idiots. Or maybe he knew and accepted it.

For Sean and I, our story as a couple, as adults, as individuals is punctuated with stories of our pets. Of Jack, the cat I got in graduate school because I was lonely in the apartment by myself and how he hated Sean and became his best enemy when Sean finally moved in. Of picking up Shakespeare one blustery cold day in early spring when the world hadn’t yet realized it was supposed to be warm. Of rescuing Lulu, our misunderstood and beautiful pit bull a sunny day in July and how she and Shakespeare immediately curled up together that night despite the heat and spent the next nine years inseparable.

Those years were years of recovery for both of us, of finding our way when the other Big Things our peers were doing weren’t available to us and support and kindness was scarce. We couldn’t afford a huge wedding like our friends. We couldn’t put a downpayment on a house. We couldn’t bring a baby home to the one bedroom apartment with a leaking roof. We couldn’t save money on my salary while Sean went to school full time, even with the GI Bill and his full-time job. We didn’t have the rituals and the roadsigns that told us we were adults. That we are on the right path. That we had gone through the correct capitalist American rite of passage at the right age.

But we had something most of them didn’t. We had dogs.

And Shakespeare didn’t nag me about why I wasn’t using my expensive education when I made $1,400 a month, rent was $750 and my student loan payments were $700. Lulu didn’t need an explanation for why, when my chronic pain stopped me from doing things, I just stopped reaching out and participating. They just curled up next to me, their reassuring breaths telling me I was alive and I was loved and that was enough.

They came with us when we traveled. They were welcome almost everywhere. We glued flowers to Lulu’s collar and got Shakey a bowtie and that solved the need for attendants at our outdoor, deep-in-the-woods wedding.

We got better jobs and we moved, three times in three years, crossing the country each time. We slept on floors, lived with no furniture for three months in a house we loved, regrettably hauled furniture up a hill in the rain to a shitty house we hated. But if they were there with us, it was home. Five beating hearts against the world.

Still, I stupidly mourned that I didn’t have a Big Thing to tell me life was changing, that I was on the right path. That I was here.

On Friday I experienced that The Big Thing. The Big Thing, the rite of passage, the marked change of season in my life from then to now. The underrated, unspoken Big Thing: Losing the soul dog that got you through your 20s.

We lost Jack in 2019 only a month after we moved to Boise. We lost Lulu in 2021, during a tumultuous and frightening time made worse by the pandemic. We lost Shakespeare on Friday, the last beating heart of who I had been to who I would have to be without him sleeping on my feet while I work, without our morning rituals of me pretending I don’t see him trying to open the treat drawer in the kitchen and then caving and giving him one. Of feeling his heavy warm weight on me when everything else feels hard and strange and stacked against me, or coming around the corner and looking at the empty space on the couch where he usually curled up.

I don’t know who I’m supposed to be next. Selfishly, I don’t want to find out without the power of that unconditional (okay, conditional if I moved him from his spot on the couch) acceptance and love that helped me survive the years from 25 to 38. But I got my road sign. I got my Big Thing. Change is here.

There is a line, a finite crack between then and now that will color all my memories. A time of when we had you and once you were gone.

Is this too much grief for a pet? Am I going to invite eye rolls because it’s just a dog? Or my favorite “that’s not real love because you don’t have kids.”

It’s never too much to honor the things that move you forward, or grieve the loss of the relationships that made you feel safe.

Shakespeare trying to push me off the thrifted piano bench I used as a desk chair on my 27th birthday.

We're All Bad Art Friends

If you haven’t read Who is The Bad Art Friend then I’m incredibly jealous of you and I’m sad in the knowledge that the two days it took me to finish that journalistic deuce is time I will never get back. If you’re inclined to read it, I guess I can’t stop you. 

Before I hit on the concept of an “art friend” because that’s fucking fascinating to me, I want to just make some points:

• Dorland is a giant walking micro-aggression and I’m shocked more people who knew her didn’t talk shit about her.

• Sonya Larson didn’t do anything wrong and definitely didn’t deserve legal action.

• White women in all walks of life, but especially in art, need to calm the shit down - AAPI and BIPOC writers aren’t taking our spots or our successes or edging us out. There is enough room for all our stories, and if you think there isn’t, that means you don’t value all kinds of storytelling and that makes you a turd. 

• People are going to talk shit about you in the business, personal, art, and internet world. You’re going to need to find a way to deal with that. 

• As someone with an invisible illness, I gotta say Dorland’s aggressive need for a pat on the head, attention, and admiration for donating a healthy kidney was really, and I mean really ableist and just gross. It’s very Munchausen-y.

What I did take away from this was the concept of an “art friend” and what that is. I don’t know what it takes to be a good art friend. Retweets? Buying your book? Talking you down off a Twitter ledge? 

Something my instructor said on the first day of graduate school stuck with me and I feel like it applies in the context of this question.  “Once you’ve published something, you can’t take it back.” We were talking about memoirs, experiences, fiction inspiration, and reader perception. 

“If you do write about someone, don’t be cruel. Never substitute cruelty for honesty or to get back at someone because you won’t be able to take it back, especially if you feel different later. Even if they don’t know it’s about them, it’s still cruel. Even if they never read it, it’s still cruel.” 

Don’t be cruel feels like the most important lesson any of us could learn about anything in life. It feels like the only lesson we’d really need to understand our friendships, relationships, and our art. Don’t be cruel. 

If we’re using the context of the article, I used to have a lot of “art friends”  but it was such an ego-driven space that became catty and pay-for-play that it wasn’t worth it.  This got me thinking about what’s okay to borrow, how to be inspired without hurting someone, and how do you write something you shouldn’t have to take back? What’s our responsibility as a community when we come across borrowing and what do we owe each other as a community? What constitutes an “art friend”? In a world where we tweet a lot of random thoughts and stories into the void, what stories do we own and what’s fair game? 

When I think of bad art friends, I think about the guy in my Intro to Creative Fiction class who read a new short story every week, but those short stories would sound very problematically like something another student had shared the week before, or I think about the person gatekeeping press info or bragging about nepotistic connections. I think about people who wouldn’t succeed anyway. 

This made me want to tell a story about a bad art friend and ask the writer scene at large how to deal with someone else’s success when they’ve hurt you because I have no idea how to handle that. I’ve referenced this obliquely but about a decade ago another aspiring writer and a long-time friend asked me to review their manuscript for a novella contest. When we talk about art friends, this person was my first true art friend. I was so impressed with them that I couldn’t see the red flags. The rose-colored glasses slipped over time and I saw this person had a habit of gatekeeping, of borrowing from other people’s manuscripts, writing retellings of classics or translations of work that didn’t need to be retold or translated - they were just….using classical work in the public domain and putting their name on it. Neat. The talent that I thought I had been attracted to in this person was their ego. I assumed this novella was another retelling of some classic fiction but it wasn’t fiction. Not one lick.

A few years earlier, a mutual friend “Jamie” had disclosed a very personal and traumatic life event to both Bad Art Friend and myself in confidence. Because of this life event, Jamie made choices we didn’t agree with as part of their healing journey. These choices strained our relationships with Jamie, but ultimately, their healing and safety came first (as they should have). 

Bad Art Friend’s manuscript, when I finally read it, was Jamie’s story word for word. Jamie didn’t write it down in an email or letter, they didn’t DM us that information. Jamie sat down with us and shared their experience. There was no copy/paste moment. This was deliberate. What was even shittier was that this was a take-down of what Bad Art Friend thought of Jamie’s choices; choices Bad Art Friend didn’t have to make because they had a stable and healthy support system, money, and access. Bad Art Friend turned a friend’s trust into something they thought they could profit and benefit from. They turned Jamie’s confidence in them into something vicious to look and feel important. Unlike snagging a line from a Facebook post or a phrase from a tweet, this was full names, places, dates, times. Bad Art Friend even included the names of Jamie’s pets at the time. There was zero fiction here. It was breathtakingly cruel; beyond exposing someone’s pain that wasn’t their story to tell, they thought so highly of their own intellectual and artistic standing that they assumed that Jamie was now so beneath them and unintelligent that they would never read the novella should it be published. I called Bad Art Friend out, they said it wasn’t illegal and that Jamie wasn’t smart enough to read it. 

I did what I thought was right and contacted the press holding the contest. This was equally shitty because now I had to break Jamie’s confidence in a small way to protect them in a bigger way and tell them that while I know this isn’t illegal, I can recognize this person and they have a right to privacy. Their response was “oh, that sucks”. I don’t know what happened but this was before writer Twitter would go apeshit over everything and Instagram didn’t care about small presses and we were too old for Tumblr so I guess BAF placed second but they didn’t publish. The press isn’t around anymore anyway, and the novella doesn’t exist in print or KDP.  To this day, BAF has a certain reputation for very closely skirting the line on plagiarism and being unethical, but they still enjoy a very stable and increasingly popular writing career. We haven’t spoken since and I have no desire to read their work. Jamie and I lost touch and last I knew, BAF and Jamie haven’t spoken for years. 

I don’t know if I mourn not having my Bad Art Friend by my side all these years. There was value and support in that friendship that pushed me to be a better writer, but there was also secrecy, competitiveness, and gaslighting. The friendship made me a better artist and writer but it also made me, I think, a shittier person in some regards. 

My Gdrive is a wasteland of nine, yes, nine, ¾ finished manuscripts because I choke at pivotal plot points even when I know exactly where the book should go next. I choke because I don’t want someone to think it’s about them; that the situational tension I’m creating, the outcomes, aren’t a testimonial about my feelings regarding certain people, it’s an observation on a situation, a catalyst, an environment. My characters are, largely, dolls in a dollhouse, as I feel most of our characters should be. 

Before I realized how bonkers the entire bad art friend article was, I was almost on Dorland’s side. I’m not comfortable using too much from real life; some stories aren’t ours to tell. But Dorland went above and beyond to make sure everyone heard her story, even if they didn’t want to. She wanted attention and she got it, however indirectly.

I still don’t understand what an art friend is, or how to be a good one. Just know if I can’t say something nice, I’ll try not to say anything defamatory. If I can’t buy your book, I’ll ask my library to carry it, and if I think you’re a fuckwit, I’ll just mute you on Twitter.

 If I donate you a kidney, you better throw me a fucking parade or so help me.

Go forth. Be good art friends, but mostly, don’t be shitty.

The Only Elimination Diet You Should Follow is Eliminating Bullshit

Like anybody campaigning for "most enigmatic cool person you know 2021," I made it a point to limit my social media use for January. In December, I noticed the more time I spent on insta, the more I got bombarded with autoimmune diet inspo ads and marketing - the kind of bullshit programs aimed at people with autoimmune diseases, and it was bringing up a lot of shit for me.

I have an autoimmune disease.

I'm also fat. 

I also have not fully recovered from or received appropriate treatment for a life-long eating disorder. Fat people can have those, too. 

Seeing autoimmune fitness and "heal through food" influencers pop up is one of the worst, if not the worst, trigger for my eating disorder and subsequent autoimmune shame spiral. The more I dug, the more it became apparent and problematically ironic that the people pushing the diets… .don't have the disorder or disease or allergy it treated? They were just….thin? And talking out their asses for money? 

The skinny is that elimination diets were created to help people with allergies and inflammatory responses, as disease and symptom mitigation and diagnostic tools. Adipose reduction, fat loss, or "getting a snatched waist" is occasionally a byproduct of elimination diets but not the initial purpose or goal. Elimination diets fundamentally aren't meant to create a calorie deficit; they're a method of mitigating symptoms and reducing inflammatory responses. For some people, that means no sugar; for others, that means no wheat or alcohol. For me, it means don't eat Sweet'N Low, or I'm going to blackout in agony and come to with eldritch summoning sigils on the wall in chicken's blood and a portal to the giant scorpion dimension in my closet. 

Before we get into it, I say this with all love and respect, the next person who tells me to stop eating nightshade plants, I'm gonna shit on your lawn. 

I will.

Try me.

It's hard to find value and fact in something once it becomes co-opted and gimmicky. Rheumatic and autoimmune diseases are still a substantial gray area, so there's rheum (see what I did there? #SOPUNNY) to realize that these diets may be contradictory and not that solid in their application on an individual basis. 

Case in point: I have polymyositis, and the polymyositis diet urges people with that disorder to eat red meat, grains, and dairy. I have rheumatoid arthritis too, and that diet says don't eat red meat, dairy, or grains. Guess I'm just going to stick with this vodka and dog food smoothie diet until they figure something else out. At least my hair is shiny.

 Like many people with autoimmune diseases, I assumed there was some intense moral failing of mine that I, despite my frequent and in-depth self-hatred-induced scrutiny of every single daily action, had somehow missed. I thought I could regain control of my life through an elimination diet or a severe, unsustainable lifestyle. Spokesperson-driven elimination autoimmune diets succeed in driving home the idea that yes, you worthless turd if you hadn't eaten that bag of Swedish Fish in May of 2001, you'd be perfectly healthy. Suffer, peasant. You deserve this hell. 

I fall for this shit at least once every few months. Before I fell for it this time, I talked to my husband about how I was sure it would work and solve all my problems. Being an arrogant biologist who is, well, arrogant, he laughed at me a lot and then reminded me about the time we accidentally went on an elimination diet and how that diet solved zero problems and was terrible.

We were on an elimination diet accidentally, you see because there was a period of time in 2009 when we could not afford food. This isn't hyperbole or me being glib or a blue-collar takedown to own the food libs, or whatever else sounds like a Republican with a brain injury. Yes, we had jobs as in plural per. No, they didn't pay enough. Yes, we were frugal. No, we didn't waste all our money on Starbucks and avocados. No, we couldn't hunt or plant a garden or pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

The problem started when our refrigerator died, and we lost about $200 worth of groceries (keep in mind the statistic that most American families are unprepared for a $400 emergency). Our landlord had something shitty in the lease about not being legally required to provide us with appliances. While trying to save for a new refrigerator and not having one to use, we were subsisting off cheap protein we'd buy day-of and cook when we got home, stale bran cereal that was past its sell-by date, rice, tuna, and a canned vegetable, usually beans or peas or green beans.

I lost almost 25 lbs in six weeks; something people congratulated me for aggressively. Thanks. Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's a mentally draining socio-economic situation that's damaging her thyroid. 

I was also diagnosed with high blood pressure during this timeframe despite my BP historically being textbook low. My hair thinned considerably. I was experiencing mood swings and vision changes. My period stopped, I experienced one of the worst poly flares I've had to date, and I was the most medicated I'll ever be in my adult life (I hope). I also had an iron, b12, D, and iodine deficiency. And the cherry on that sugar substitute keto sundae was that I became severely clinically depressed. WOOHOO! I now see why my pilot about a plucky 20 something living in the small boring city went nowhere. 

The daily menu at chateau du depressing included rice, tuna, and canned vegetables one to two meals a day for several weeks on end. From a scientific standpoint, on days we could snag cake or pizza from work birthday parties or stale bagels and donuts from the break room, we reintroduced sugar, wheat, and dairy back into our diets with no adverse side effects. This sugar and gluten fest was about once a month or once every pay period. Having servings of sugar or dairy, or processed foods, this spaced-out should have highlighted my inflammatory response if I had one. It didn't. I had no adverse reactions. I didn't bleed from the eyes or poop out my gallbladder or see an increase in my autoimmune symptoms. I simply ate a piece of cake and went about my day, not in a detrimental calorie deficit. One day my boss bought our department Taco Bell and that limp, freezer burnt lettuce on what passed for a taco was the first fresh vegetable I had in a month. I lied. I did have an adverse reaction to the Taco Bell - I ruined my purse trying to smuggle a chalupa home. 

This is a bummer. Yes. It's not fun to talk about. But by being poor, we couldn't afford or refrigerate and therefore did not eat:

Most wheat or gluten-based products

Sugar

Nightshade based vegetables or really any fresh veggies or fruit

Eggs

Dairy

Coffee

Red meat and poultry unless we cooked it immediately. 

Lunchmeat/cold cuts

Alcohol 

This story does have a happy ending….kind of? We were able to get a fridge and groceries after a while. And after we got a tax return, we blew a small wad on garbage pizzas and wings and didn't die.

These six months were probably the most challenging and most traumatic of my young adult life. When you have to steal toilet paper out of a Wal*Mart bathroom (yes, we did that) and you rely on your coworkers leaving a box of stale donut holes in the break room for at least one daily meal, privilege becomes highlighted against the backdrop of your hunger. I try not to recommend or offer advice on autoimmune-type stuff unless someone asks, and there are only about four people I ask for autoimmune-type advice in return. It's in our nature to be helpful, so we make recommendations that may not be feasible for someone - emotionally, financially, medically, practically. That's the positive side of elimination diets in the autoimmune community. People are usually just trying to help. The negative side of elimination diets is that we generally assume the healing power of any elimination diet for people with autoimmune disorders is the calorie deficit and subsequent weight loss. This attitude creates a new web of food morality, trapping people in the idea that they're at fault and refuse to do better when that's usually never the case.

When we could afford food again, I went into a long bingeing cycle, which is a common reaction to periods of food scarcity or restriction. So the long-term impact of my accidental elimination diet was negative. The short-term effects were everybody congratulated me for losing weight, and nobody noticed I was staving off scurvy with a bunch of Halls Vitamin C lozenges I had leftover from a nasty bout of bronchitis. My takeaway from that experience wasn't a better understanding of my disease or a sense of preparedness for symptom mitigation. My takeaway was that many people conflated my weight with my symptoms and thought I was in control and just choosing not to solve a problem.

That's total bullshit.

Since I have a small and unimportant platform, what's my advice? If peppers don't irritate you, eat the peppers. Work out. Take your meds, stay hydrated, and stay off social media. The best elimination diet you can go on is refusing to swallow someone else's prejudice and bad science.

The Short and Sweet Problem of Borat

Borat came out my sophomore year in college. I hated it a lot. I still do. While he's making fun of some intensely terrible sentient piles of cat vomit (lookin' at you, Rudy), the studio behind the first Borat movie did extremely shitty things, and I'm hesitant to think this behavior has since changed significantly since Amazon is in on it now.

In the first movie, scenes set in Kazakhstan were filmed in a Romanian village called Glod, an impoverished town full of poor, racially targeted, and ethnically oppressed Romani. These people were, of course, happy to do whatever the 20th Century Fox producers onsite asked them to do because they desperately needed money. You can read about the producers' impact here and here, but the gist of it is that extras in the movie were paid the equivalent of $3.50 for appearing on camera even though the film made $262 million worldwide. Glod is a town that had no running water, no sewage, and is the very definition of impoverished at the time of filming. But fuck, it was funny, right? Especially the part where they gave an amputee a rubber dildo and told him it's a real prosthetic. Yuk yuk. Residents of Glod tried to sue the studio, but the lawsuit has been thrown out twice. The first movie garnered seven lawsuits, some from obnoxious racist pissbabies who didn't want to get caught being racist pissbabies, others from artists who didn't get paid for the use of their work. The second movie comes out today, and it's already garnering lawsuits. You can read that bullshit here.

So while yes, he makes powerful assholes look like the assholes they are, he's no better than the racist fistulas he tricks into appearing on camera. He's taking advantage of people in poverty for your financial gains and notoriety, and that shit is as American as an immigrant getting their ass kicked at a rodeo.

I don't see the point of this movie or even the need for it. Are there still some people who don't know this president, and the people he surrounds himself with are egregious, amoral fucktoilets who belong in a prison cell? Like, who doesn't know that yet?

Please pardon me if I'm not going to revel in whatever sad catharsis we get from laughing at a guy making fun of foreigners by pretending to be one (if we canceled Macklemore over this instead of how shitty his music was, why is what Baron Cohen does okay?) under the pretext of "bringing down the man." At the same time, he subsequently abuses, takes advantage of, and mocks a bunch of non-white, non-Christian ethnic groups to fill his pockets.

Fuck that guy.

Be From Somewhere

Last month we moved across the country. Again. For the third time. In like three years. 

Me, the husband, two dogs and a very, very, very old and smelly cat, moved from Pittsburgh to Boise and I can literally see your facial expressions right now and hold that thought. 

When I was telling people we were getting ready to move I got so. Many. Eye rolls. Curled lips. Sneers.  From the incredulous “What’s in Boise?”  to the pitying “oh, that sucks” or the disdainful “Boise? Ew. On Purpose?”. 

Yes. On purpose.

So what’s in Boise? My husband’s promotion where he can meet career goals* and more of the PAC Northwest lifestyle that we like. Some of the sneers and the eye rolls I got were from life-long Pittsburghians, to which I say be careful what yinz sneer at. 

A lot of the sneers and eye rolling wasn’t at the fact that I’m basically a professional nomad and incapable of holding my life in one place for more than 18 months at a time, which is admittedly troubling if you’re the rooted sort, it was that most detractors seemed to think that Boise is a lame place where people ride horses to work and use potatoes as money.

 Which is a totally stupid thing to say. They don’t ride horses to work. They use real money like everyone else and they ride potatoes to work. Don’t be classist and rude.

Ever been to New Jersey? No? But I bet you have opinions about New Jersey. Ever been to Nebraska? No? I’ll bet you have opinions about Nebraska. The same for inner city Detroit and uptown Manhattan. 

Before I spill all the tee, I have to acknowledge that yes, while moving itself is a hardship and a giant pain in the ass, we’ve been privileged to be able to move for better opportunities and see a lot of the US because of it.

And because of that privilege, I’m here to tell you the following:

Stop thinking certain geographic locations have more merit or are somehow “cooler” and therefore make the person living there or from there “more cool.” Cool is not a real thing that exists in the US. Poverty is. Because in all my extensive traveling of the US, that’s what I’ve seen the most. Poverty. 

I have lived places I did not like living because of cost, the economy, or literally the weather. I have lived places that I liked but couldn’t sustain living there because of the cost of living, economy, or literally the weather. I had good experiences in towns I hated. I had terrible experiences in places I loved. A lot of factors can play a role in how we perceive a place. Because of things like in-group/out-group and tribalism, and literally our own ingrained beliefs of better/best based on a lifetime of being swatted around by capitalism, imperialism, manifest destiny, and media portrayal, places we’ve never been have more merit than even our own hometowns. Manhattan is superior to Kansas City. California is better than Iowa. If I ask you to picture a waitress from Brooklyn, you’re probably picturing a likeably annoying Lena Dunham type who is just waiting for her pilot to get picked up by Hulu. If I asked you to picture a waitress from Kansas, is it the same girl with the same dreams? Probably not.

That waitress from Brooklyn is probably more interesting than a farmer from Missouri , because farming is only interesting if it involves smuggling black tar heroin in cows butts or something. I don’t know, I didn’t watch Ozark. 

With the democratic debates kicking up steam, there are all these think pieces coming out about What’s Wrong With America and How To Fix America like there’s this reset switch under the constitution and we’re all waiting for the Chosen One (you know the chosen one is 100% Nicolas Cage) to come and flip it. 

There is no chosen one.

Nobody’s coming to save us. 

We’re trapped in this plummeting elevator together and if we all jump just before it crashes we’re still going to get crushed. 

Waiting until the last minute to wake up to reality isn’t going to fix things. 

The reality, as I’ve seen it driving across the country three times, is this:

Be from somewhere else. Leave your fishbowl of a city or tiny home town (yes, even cities can be fishbowls). Where you come from geographically does not make you better or more worthy of coolness. Also, sidetrack: I’m willing to go on a limb and shit on my generation a tiny bit in that millennials, on the cusp of middle-age, are still way too worried about being cool.

We stopped for gas in Utah and my hair was sticking out in this giant matted half bun, half dreadlock situation from falling asleep with my head against the seat, my face was puffy and I smelled like trucker farts and every single thing I was self conscious or worried about fluttered around me like flies. I look like boiled shit, I’m tired, I don’t know where I am, and I have to go function for five seconds to buy gas and I don’t want to function right now because everybody in this tiny gas station is going to judge me for looking like a flaming outhouse. 

Then I had the dumbest thought on the planet. 

“I’m from New York. I bet these dumb motherfuckers have never even left the state. I can look like boiled shit if I want to. Because I’m cultured.”

Each time I move across the country I’m reminded about how little I’ve grown and how little I understand the world.

Then somebody with alarming eyebrows and tarnished facial piercings asks me oh my god, how could you move to such a small-minded place? How could you move to a place so devoid of art, culture, and like, meaning?  or someone with YeeYee bumper sticker tries to warn me about weirdos in the big city and I feel better about where I’m at as a person.

I can’t stress enough: Be from somewhere else. Travel if you can. See something that isn’t a corporately owned amusement park, talk to people who have different ideas than you. The world is bigger and smaller than we think and we can’t fix the big things until we’re willing to fix ourselves.

Be from somewhere else. 

*His career goals involve literally saving the planet and preserving water during a climate crisis so when the water wars start, I’ll remember those of you who sneered at the QUEEN OF WATER. Good luck washing your taints now, you smug doubters. I did always want to be Tank Girl.

Trigger Warning

I had a conversation recently in which someone said “don’t be triggered (about the topic), just listen to what the other person has to say.”

In my grown-up job I work with therapists. In another life, I worked with therapy clients, medical, and mental health patients. 

I have seen people be triggered. 

I have been triggered.

In this instance, this person was misusing the word to mean “annoyed” or “irritated.”  In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya:

You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

The term “triggered” is misused and I’m here to help you with Don’t Be an Asshole 101: Trigger Warning.

In medical and mental health practices, the term means:

“An external events or circumstances that may produce very uncomfortable emotional or psychiatric symptoms, such as anxiety, panic, discouragement, despair, or negative self-talk.” You can find the rest of the article here. 

The medical definition is:

“something (as a specific act or stimulus) that in interaction with the body constitutes a physiological trigger.” 

You can read that definition here.

Triggered does not mean “ irrationally annoyed” or “butthurt for attention”. If you’re having a conversation in which you know the topics are going to annoy or upset someone on purpose, you’re a giant gaping butthole and you should work on yourself. I’m not going to discuss the myriad of ways and reasons people can be triggered and reminded of their trauma, but I deeply hope if one of your friends was mugged, you wouldn’t talk about mugging in front of them every time you see them, ask them about it, or deliberately wear the same cologne as their mugger or whatever. It’s upsetting; it triggers memories of a chemical response/fight or flight and puts their body back in that chemical response. It stands to reason they’d be hurt, scared, or upset by being reminded of a traumatic event. 

Colloquially, we like to misuse mental health terms all the time:

•  “She’s so OCD.” 

• “Ugh, my new boss is bipolar.” 

• “This chick is a total psycho.”

OCD is a difficult and life-altering behavioral disorder, so is bipolar disorder, and having seen several psychotic episodes myself, it’s not funny or interesting. It’s terrifying for the person experiencing it. 

Misusing “triggered” to mean annoyed or irritated is like saying “oh my god, she was so dilated after that conversation.”

Uncomfortable and weird, yes?

If you’re not sure you should use the word “triggered”, replace it with another very specific medical or clinical term and if it makes you squick out, stop using any of those words in that context. 

Examples:

• Wow, he’s being totally prolapsed about this.

• Don’t talk about that around Jane, she’ll go totally engorged on you and make it about her.

Gross. Weird. Uncomfortable.

To sum up:

Stop using a valid clinical/medical term to justify treating someone badly or being rude in conversation.

This Book Brought To You By My Student Loans: Unpublished Chapter

So advance copies of my book, This Book Brought to You By My Student Loans, mailed out today. As a present for all of you who patiently ordered and waited, and as incentive for the rest of you to buy a copy, here’s a chapter that didn’t make the final cut but I still love.

Biology 101

When I was eight we had a chicken that tried to have sex with a plastic planter full of petunias.

In the rooster’s defense, the object of his affection was shaped like a chicken; it was large and white with off-center yellow eyes airbrushed vaguely where a chicken’s eyes would be and green grass airbrushed at the squared off bottom of the planter. Every good country home in the 80s had one of these suckers out front.

The petunia enthusiast was smaller than a regular chicken and if at all possible, a bigger asshole. For obvious reasons, my mom named him Richard. Richard was a glossy oil-slick black, except on his head where his feathers exploded in a Phyllis Diller poof of white, obscuring the potted plant aficionado within. One lone yellow eye bugged out from the coif of white feathers and would lock on to you with a dim sense of purpose as he sized up your sneakers, figuring out if they were friend or foe. Friend meant you’d have a small chicken gleefully humping your foot. Foe meant you had a small chicken clawing the shit out of your foot for god and country.

Richard got punted across the yard a lot. 

He chased all the lady chickens around, yes, but he also chased our horses, cats, dogs, and the lawn mower. 

This is actually a story about employers trying to dictate an employees birth control coverage, but please keep Richard the Tiny Horny Rooster romancing a plastic bucket of flowers in your mind. 

I once had a supervisor named Shane who was in his early fifties. Shane grew up on a chicken farm, squat and broad, balding and paunchy with cloudy blue eyes that made you ignore the spark of meanness and ignorance behind them because he had resting manager face. At a staff potluck lunch (mandatory because we weren’t getting along as an office so forcing us to cook for each other and expecting us to abide by the honor system and not put Visine* in the fruit salad was a great idea) we got on the subject of chicken husbandry.  During a question and answer game, one of my coworkers asked Shane how chickens had sex. Shane primly wiped his chin and daintily folded his hands.

“Oh. The females lay eggs in the nesting boxes and the roosters come by and spray the eggs with a sperm-filled mist,” he said.

If you’re confused: Chickens procreate via sexual contact. The roosters mount the hens, so if you ever see chickens giving each other piggyback rides, that’s totally not what’s happening. 

As Richard the Tiny Horny Rooster showed me one sunny Saturday, chicken sex is fluttery and complicated and ruins your mom’s petunias. 

Richard had been kicked out of the chicken yard by a bunch of hens who were sick of his shit. He wandered, lonely and heart sick, on to our porch. His eyes locked on the beautiful, gigantic, plastic lady chicken that held my mom’s petunias. With a determined hop, he latched on to the sharp rim of plastic and, in thirty-seconds of flapping ecstasy, ruined the flowers. 

 Throughout the next few weeks, Richard would cause a ruckus on the porch trying to get to his beloved, who we’d had to move even further out of his reach after each attempt. He’d sometimes sit at the foot of the porch steps, clucking up at the planter like some poultry Romeo and Juliette. 

During that mandatory potluck, I thought of Richard trying to cluck a plastic chicken with gleeful determination and I realized Shane was dangerous.  A man of some authority, who had lived on this planet for 55 years, still thought the prissy story his mother probably told him to cover up her own embarrassment was how the world actually worked.

The previous insurance enrollment period, Shane had me collate all the employee insurance packets to mail out. One of the insurance memos I had just printed out sat on the copier. He picked it up between thumb and forefinger like it burned him. In big bold print it read:

ALL METHODS OF ORAL CONTRACEPTION ARE COVERED BY THIS PLAN AT A ZERO COPAY.

His face turned a deep shade of puce and spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. “That is just irresponsible and unprofessional,”  he whined at me.

“If I was allowed the pick the plans, and obviously my input wasn’t important here, we wouldn’t be dealing with this nonsense.” He crumpled the flier with contempt.

“You all shouldn’t be allowed to have an abortion every day for free on the company dollar!” He stomped to his office and started playing the Fred Durst cover of Behind Blue Eyes at top volume, which is how I knew he felt especially put-upon. 

Shane had been explained away by HR as being someone they couldn’t fire because it wasn’t technically HR’s responsibility to correct where public education so fabulously failed. Rumors swirled about Shane’s intense lack of basic common knowledge, and this did explain why he was upset about the unisex bathroom. I had heard him say that men could get cancer if they shared a toilet with a “bleeding woman”  and there was a rumor that he had asked a female staff member if women wore padded bras because our boobs always leaked and what did we do with the milk after our kids were weaned? 

Shane was in charge of way too much for how ignorant he was, which made him dangerous. He lived in a dream world where chickens reproduce like salmon and women can make our own whipped cream if we jump rope without a bra on. We need to think about things like this when we promote people, or vote them into office, or give them driver’s licenses, let them own guns, be police officers, doctors, teachers or basically do anything other than work the air-brush machine at the factory that makes chicken shaped planters.  No woman on this planet should have to pay insane out of pocket costs for birth control because some stupid man is sitting behind a desk, thinking vaginas are icky, women are terrible, and that chicken spawn like fish. 

I will be forever thankful that nobody took his input regarding our employee healthcare plan. I will be forever horrified that this is not always the case.  I will always be on the lookout for ways to tell people about Richard, the Horny Tiny Rooster.

Epilogue:

I want to tell you that something awesome happened for Richard the Horny Tiny Rooster. I want to tell you that Petunia the Planter laid a bunch of plastic easter eggs and some flower/chicken hybrids hatched and lived happily ever after.  I’m not sure what happened to him, but I like to think he had a great life on our farm, fucking plastic planters and chasing the lawn mower.

Post Epilogue: My mom says he was eaten by a coyote. I can only hope he met his death with dignity and honor, unlike most chickens. RIP Richard.

*Please do not put Visine in someone’s food. This causes hospital-admission level diarrhea. Not that I’ve ever done it.

Don't Ask Me if I Want A Cupcake

I was at a wedding a few years ago where a four year old laid down in front of the cupcake table and, with her wrist flung over her eyes with dramatic flair, her hair trailing behind her on the floor -a tiny Ophelia in a flower girl dress- said to any adult who came near her in a beleaguered voice, “I’m too tired, don’t ask me if I want a cupcake. I’m too tired for cupcakes. I do not want a cupcake.”

You know she wanted the shit out of some cupcakes. 

This comes to mind when, at least once a week, someone on my Facebook feed says they’re thinking of leaving Facebook. I picture them sprawled on the floor in front of a digital cupcake in the shape of Mark Zuckerberg, arms flung dramatically over their eyes, telling the whole digital world that they emphatically do not want a cupcake. On one hand, fuck yeah. I’m really sick of Facebook, too. Go. Fly. Be free. Get out while you can.

On the other hand, do you want a medal? Are you expecting Saint Peter to put you at the front of the line for heaven? Can you take a poop without taking out a front page add?

I know. Ring the hypocrite alarm.  I shared this on Facebook.

Social media has a specifically weird hold on my generation which has produced really weird results. Physically, emotionally, we can tell when something is bad for us and studies show that social media has a lot of negative effects. I think it speaks to how intense social media has become that we feel the need to take a social measurement from the echo chamber before pulling away. It’s weird and annoying.

But it also addresses something that needs to be talked about among older millennials, those of us who straddled the I drank from the hose and didn’t die! generation but also live that #blessed life. Social media has impacted our generation in an intense way. 

I didn’t feel the effects of social media until I was in my mid-twenties. During my Freshman year of college the internet was still this gauzy thing that other people spent a lot of time on and wasn’t a necessity for daily life.  By the time I graduated college, I was intensely curating my social media pages, both Facebook and MySpace, my AIM profile, and my OpenDiary. By the time I finished grad school, I spent a majority of my time on social media looking for answers to things I wasn’t handling well in the adult world. I combed through the profiles of people who treated me badly and then sent me friend requests five years later like they didn’t still owe me $150, of people I had treated badly and wanted to stalk, hoping to rekindle that fight to get one more final word in. It played a role in warping my perception of friendship and happiness and of life. 

And every step of the way, I had the option to not participate.

The memories section of my Facebook isn’t a happy place. It’s not photos of stuff I did or people I hung out with. It’s just regurgitating to me cringe-worthy shit I said from three years ago, six years ago, ten years ago.

It’s a depression scrapbook. It’s a toxic relationship archive.

But like anything that’s a huge grey area, without Facebook I wouldn’t have reconnected with amazing people that I almost lost to time or childhood misconceptions. I wouldn’t have gone down the clickhole that lead me to the job I currently have now and adore. I wouldn’t have my first book coming out soon, I’m pretty sure, if it weren’t for Facebook.

But Facebook is also where I found out someone close to me thinks David Hogg and Adam Lanza are the same person. It’s where I found out an entire relationship can be blown out of the water over the order in which your post shows up in someone’s feed. 

Especially now, when the world feels like it’s on fire and the news every day brings one more blow; school shootings, anti-vaxers, climate change, police brutality, student debt, and so so so much more, we get to find out via the comment section what our 500 nearest and dearest think about things that hold our society in a tipping point. We get to find out the hard things about ourselves and the people we love via social media.  Misinformation shared under the guise of heroism can spread like wildfire and put people at risk. It’s literally putting our country at risk, and our mental health.

So what do we do?

Do we all unplug?

Do we all lay in front of the cupcake table to make a point?

Because I don’t have an answer. But what I can say, is like…

You guys. 

I think….

I don’t want a cupcake. Don’t ask me if I want a cupcake. 

Millennials Ruin Everything: Disney Edition

I have said before and I still stand by it: Some childless couples who go to Disney are weird. 

By that I mean I know a lot of weird people who are obsessed with Disney and don’t want to expand their horizons. That leads me to shamefully agree with some of that Rick Sanchez-toned op ed inspired by an unhinged Angry Wine Mom FB rant. To be clear, conservative op eds and Angry Wine Moms are like my two least favorite things on the planet. But I do agree that Disney people need to expand their horizons a little. 

Before you’re all like MEGAN HATES JOY just give me a second to explain:

I used to have a friend we’ll call Bleminda Mouse who was a huge Disney Girl.  When I started hanging out with Bleminda, I thought she was fun and outgoing but over time I realized our friendship only revolved around Disney-related things: going to the mall with the end goal being the Disney store where she would spend hours dancing and singing and fondling the stuffed animals and dolls, going to the movies but we would only see Disney movies. Halloween parties were just an excuse for Bleminda to dress up like a Disney character. She swooned and swanned around all lonely hearts club saying Disney gave her an “unrealistic expectation of love” while turning down dates with actually decent guys.

Yeah. She was one of those Disney Girls. 

She started backing out of doing things based on what was on the Disney Channel. She scheduled her classes around reruns of Kim Possible and That’s so Raven. Did I mention she was 23?

She was resistant to do basically anything adult after a while and when one of her college classes required her to go to Paris for a month and she was beyond livid at being “forced” to go. To Paris. This was before Ratatouille came out, obviously. 

It became hard to be friends with Bleminda because it wasn’t a rewarding friendship; most of her other friends were cartoon characters. It was frustrating.

Now she’s married to another obvious Disney person and last year they went to Disney six times, after a Disney themed wedding and a Disney honeymoon. Last I knew she had a distinctly stressful job and, from the looks of it, grew up and is willing to work an adult schedule regardless of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody reruns.

But she’s a weirdo who connects with problematic children’s characters on a deep emotional level.

Who wouldn’t want to take a shot at someone like that. She’s an adult without kids who goes to amusement parks for vacation.

So what?

I’m not her mom or her landlord so she can spend her money any fucking way she wants. 

To be honest, I don’t like Disney Girls. They suck the air out of the room talking about cartoons and stupid shit I hardly remember and mostly refuse to participate in things they’re not interested in. They’re kind of immature around the edges and a little weird in their slavish devotion to a corporate entity. 

But you know who else dominates conversations, refuses to participate in things they’re not interested in, talks about shit other people don’t care about, are kind of immature around the edges and a little weird in their slavish devotion to a corporate entity?

Sports fans.

Who are mostly dudes.

Who nobody seems to be writing intense Facebook posts about how millennial sports fans ruin sporting events or eagerly penning bandwagon op eds about them to fit their confirmation bias about millennials. 

I’m starting to see an equation in bitching about millennials to have an underlying theme to be bitching about women.

And while I do not like Disney not paying their employees a living wage and living a life that inspires this kind of decor makes me want to jump in a pit of used hypodermic needles, my feminism is intersectional and includes room for Disney Girls. 

So Bibbidi-Bobbidi-back the fuck up and on millennial women because we’re exhausted and sick of everyone’s shit.