Unsolicited Advice

I have been sitting here for a week trying to figure out how best to explain the American clusterfuck to people overseas. It's not easy. There's a lot of context. It's the kind of thing that doesn't make any sense unless you're in it at the time. The hard fact is, people here are dying. Not of anything so easily romanticized as bombs on barricades, but of things that no citizen of any industrialized nation has any business dying of in 2016: Diabetes, anaphylactic allergies, asthma attacks, endocarditis pursuant to chronic dental abscess, stress-induced suicides, malnutrition . There is a huge economic underclass here who used to work making things , like in factories. They were, to some extent, indispensable; you have to have actual humans with actual hands to put together cars and televisions and shoes, and you always need a certain number of hands to fill your orders. But everything is now made overseas, where it's cheaper, and the "working class" ...

So on Saturday, apparently I'm going to go eat pizza and drink and commiserate and plot with a bunch of very scared and upset queer/trans people. I'm friends with these particular people from a context in which being or not being a GSM was not relevant, so I'm welcome there on the basis that they know me and are fairly sure I am not going to somehow make things worse. I'm not particularly sure I'm not going to somehow make things worse, but there you go. We all apparently had too much faith in people this fall, I'm not sure I belong there. It depends on whether you're talking physically or emotionally. There are people for whom anatomical configuration is not that important; I am unfortunately not one of them. I wouldn't rule out someday meeting a female-bodied person who is just  so  hot I decide it doesn't matter, but to date all the people I've crushed on are physically male, which means they're generally legally male, which means that ...

So that happened. I would like to apologize on behalf of America to... everyone, really. It's chaos in the US right now. Not in the physical Tahrir Square sort of sense, but in the sense that everyone, on all sides of everything, is angry right now. Anger is easier to admit to than fear, and everyone, no matter who they are, is really afraid that their very existence, the way they've lived and imagined living and hoped to live all their lives, is vanishing. The people who envisioned that working hard in a blue-collar job for decades meant they could retire to a comfortable, if small, house to garden in the afternoon and bowl with the team on Thursday nights and visit with grandkids are coming to terms with the fact that that's not how the world works anymore, and they may never get the rest they were promised. The people who saw us racing towards a world where they could be a girl one day and a boy the next, and raise 2.5 children and a dopey Labrador retriever with the...

I fail planning. Hard. You would think this would make me also fail at the end result, but no. I have a perfectly clear idea of what I want, and also a decent idea of what I'm needs to be done in order to get there, so the project I'm working on usually stands a pretty good chance of success. I'm not bad at doing . I'm just really, really, really, fucking atrociously, sometimes dangerously  bad at the part where I take the things out of my head and lay them out before me in an orderly fashion, so that I can use it as a guide to the process. I have had this problem all my life. When I was in school, I hated those assignments where you had to write a paper in graduated stages, all of which were due at different times, and all of which were graded. I used to just write the motherfucking paper and then reverse engineer all the brainstorming webs and outlines and rough drafts I needed for the points. It hurt my shriveled little grammarian soul to introduce errors into my...

A couple of my friends were discussing Election Day worries last night. Specifically, about the prospect of "poll watchers" hanging around and being douchey. Firstly, yearrrghghgh I do not have enough drugs to deal with this , but secondly, it made me think about demographics. Dorchester is, as I may have mentioned, heavily not-white. Historically, this has been a very working-class neighborhood -- around the turn of the 20th century, there were a mix of family homes and rooming houses for Irish immigrant workers where we are now -- and this seems to have held true even as the definition of "working class" has precessed from "daily toil in the factory" to "daily toil in a boring pointless office job". I see an international panoply of clothing all the time in my various neighborhood wanderings. One night on my walk home from the T, I passed a guy in a dashiki, a lady in hijaab, and a Buddhist monk in traditional beads and kesa using his bank ca...

I have discovered, doing NaNoWriMo, that I would be a rubbish romance author. Not, I hasten to add, that I am rubbish at writing people into romances. Judging by the speed at which the dialogue is writing itself, I am fine at that. The characters are flirting their little brains right out, and both of them like it. It's the same thing that happens when you get two real people in a room together and they hit it off -- the two of them have postes and ripostes and are too invested in that to let anyone else get a word in edgewise. No, I'm talking about romance as a genre, the kind of story where 'will they won't they' is the central all-absorbing conflict of the plot. There are various ways to make it difficult for your characters to link up. Environmental factors are popular. The dramatic version has them separated physically by unpleasant circumstances, or socially by class or tribal affiliation. Disney's Aladdin  is a classic example -- she's a princes...

I recently caught a notice for auditions for a show whose producers expressed a particular wish to cast actors who were PoC, queer, trans*, or genderqueer. I am definitely not a person of color; my family is almost entirely of Celtic extraction. If I had any less color to me, I'd be clear. I am also definitely not trans-anything. I'm at home in my body; it does cool stuff, even if it does hurt for no reason sometimes, and I can get it to look the way I want it to when I check the mirror. The rest of it, I really don't know how to answer. I generally tell people that I'm a straight woman. This is the fastest and easiest way to get across that I am perfectly fine being considered female by the general public, and that the bodies I want to get my grubby little paws on are fundamentally male, if you catch my drift. This is really all the information most people need in order to get the pronouns right and judge whether it's worth the effort to hit on me, and suffices...

I don't often buy CDs anymore. With media I'm generally only interested in the main content, and the hard drive stays the same size no matter how much I load onto it, so digital services are easier. It's rare that I want some part of the packaging enough to store it, and pack it, and move it from house to house when I am eventually forced to be itinerant again. Placebo released a 20th anniversary retrospective, and I paid to have them mail me one. I like them enough to give them money, and their website asks a very reasonable $11 for a 2-CD set, in a hardcover gatefold. I wanted the pictures. More accurately, I wanted to know which pictures the two of them thought were relevant. Knowing what people want to remember is sometimes more interesting than the events themselves. There is a brief introduction to the album by Brian Molko in the front of the book. I have seen very little prose from him, but it all has the same curious quality of standing by itself, hanging over t...

Someone on reddit recently posted the question, "What was the thing that made you realize you were living in the future ?" I'm not sure if I had an exact moment  for that, but the other day I had to dig through my room to find where I had put down the phone that was actively streaming music to the earbuds I was wearing at the time , so 'the future' is probably here. I expect it's going to involve me misplacing a lot of things that are no longer physically tethered to my body and/or the wall. Detangling headphone cords is a pain in the ass, but at least I always knew where the wire led. The turning point where tech became truly impressive and magical, rather than just a new and improved version of a thing I already knew about, was sometime around when everything suddenly went wireless. I'm not entirely sure why. My family had cordless telephones so early that I don't remember the main house phone ever being any other kind. Television and AM/FM/short...

I recently applied for something that required me to pony up some written samples, showcasing my analytical abilities. The person who tipped me off to the opportunity is a reader here, and seemed to think quite highly of things like linguistic and profiling essays. This all looks much more impressive on your end than on mine. You only see the things that hang together well enough to write about. The world is full of scattershot gibberish that deserves, at best, a two-line post on /r/ShowerThoughts. Those don't get 1500-word essays. I once turned in all fifty pages of a twenty page research assignment to one of my college professors, and even I can only pad so much. There are two main reasons I look like I am some kind of mad genius with a crazy-awesome hit rate: Confirmation bias, and an overblown sense of drama. The confirmation bias is down to the reader. Human brains -- mine, yours, everyone's -- are built to ping whenever two ideas connect, especially if that connecti...

I recently managed to justify buying myself a set of Bluetooth earbuds. Ruining regular earbuds is a recurring feature of my life; I go nowhere without a music player, and usually I'm carrying another ten pounds of oddly-shaped crap besides, so I'm constantly pulling the wires out of the drivers, or breaking the cord at the plug, or God forbid busting the actual headphone jack on the player with a hard enough hit. I'm trying to be smarter-slash-less desperate with money, and testing out this whole theory that if you wait a little longer and pay twice as much, you'll have to replace the damn things less than half as often. I've bought so many sets of cheap earbuds at CVS that I ought to have a buy-10-get-one punch card for them, so all I need the expensive set to do is last more than a few months, and I'm way ahead. The first set I tried were terrible -- returned with extreme prejudice the very next day, on the grounds that you have to be trying to make earbuds...

I was asked a while ago to read through a book by Catherine Hakim, called Erotic Capital: The Power In The Boardroom And The Bedroom . The library finally coughed it up, so I did. tl;dr: Hakim's thesis is interesting and absolutely deserves an entire book of analysis. She didn't bother to write one. The book is bullshit and you will just throw it at the wall. The review inquiry came to me from one of my readers, on the grounds that I've worked in an industry where attractiveness, specifically conformist femininity, is an asset. So you are all absolutely clear where I am coming from, this is me (NSFW, if your work is hostile to cleavage):

I have what may be a stupid question. I have been trying to puzzle out vocal technique for the past week or so, because banging a new thing into my head is what I do when I need to distract myself from personal chaos. Having gotten bored of imitating generic Auto-Tune quantization (reasonable success, given I am not a robot) and trying to get myself to sound less American when singing J-pop (less of a triumph), I've moved on to trying to figure out what the fuck Brian Molko is doing to sound like that on tape. Fans call his style 'distinctive'; detractors call it 'nasal'. I call it evidence the man has never had a formal voice lesson in his life, because any vocal coach worth their salt would tell him to stop doing just about everything he does, retroactively if possible. That's not the stupid question. I figured that part out. The tl;dr is that their debut album was super  high and pointy and Molko realized that was going to get real old, real quick, so he ...

I worked a gig Saturday night that took so much out of me that when my co-worker nicked some chocolate chip cookies out of the staff kitchen for me, I didn't eat them. I was so tired that food didn't taste good anymore. It was just a mouthful of crumbly stuff that really wasn't much fun at all. When I ran out of things to read on the late train home, I started desperately pawing through my phone for something to think about. Though my playlists are generally albums in proper track order or a collection of a dozen or so loose songs that won't stop circling in my head, I load entire discographies onto the storage card for exactly these kinds of emergencies. Usually there's something weird enough in the directory of bootlegs and B-sides to keep me awake until I get to my stop. I ended up listening to this on loop. That is Brian Molko on vocals, and probably him on the guitar, too; it's one of the B-sides to an early Placebo single. It sounds almost entirely un...

It's like a million degrees in Boston right now, which is starting to put a crimp in my plans. I tried to go down to the dance studio today. The studio is un-airconditioned, and the heat index was 105°F. I realized that was a terrible idea about five minutes after I got on the train, so I returned a bunch of library books and bought some ginger ale at CVS and came home. Apparently I am  the person those Excessive Heat Index warnings are for. Goddamn it. I didn't bother changing out of my dance gear when I got back. Hot pants are not technically underwear. I don't need to put on any additional pants to leave my room, even if other people are home. This was a lot easier before I realized that I wasn't supposed to be this uncomfortable when it's hot out. I always knew I did not like being out in the heat, and in fact I put my foot down when I was about twelve and flat refused to go on any family outings that involved being outside, but I didn't really think it ...

Holy shit, etizolam is brilliant . I took a test dose at 9:30, on top of a full dinner. (The roommates who have a vested interest in my existence knew I had it, and were watching movies in the next room over when I did this. I'm not stupid.) It kicked in by 10. By 11:30, I was not exactly all the way back, but I could have taken a shower or cooked a pot of pasta without injuring myself or burning the house down. Was pretty much normal by the time I went to bed, only a wee ghost of a headache from the hypotension, and no hangover in the morning. Welp. That's getting chucked into Ye Olde Box o' Nuclear Options, where the Sudafed lives. Moving generally leaves me two cocktails away from becoming the Simple Dog , so I'm probably gonna need it. An effective dose for me is somewhere between a quarter and a half a milligram, and it's diluted to a strength of ~0.1 mg/mL in a 20 oz water bottle. I'm, uh, not in any danger of running out. Ever, maybe. For the record...