I've got a few relatives who, for various reasons, can't explicitly know that I'm gay. This usually isn't much of a problem because we see each other rarely at best. I've got my own thing going on two states away from them, and since they don't use Facebook, ne'er the twain do meet. It's a fairly common arrangement: they have the class not to try to set me up with nice Italian boys, and I have the class not to mount the dinner table like Edmund Hilary taking the summit of Everest, screaming "I AM A MIGHTY, MIGHTY BULLDYKE AND I HAVE SEX WITH WOMEN" and stabbing the pot roast with a labrys.
Which would be awkward because I'm coupled up now and my life is really very mundane. Our greatest daily excitement is the question of the relative healthiness of eggs over bagels. There's no way I could do justice to the initial screaming and stabbing of the pot roast. In this type of situation, the last thing you want is to be a disappointment.
Then, of course, having broken the rules of our gentlepeoples' agreement, I would expect to be forcibly tied to a chair in a neat local cafe as a nice Italian dentist sits across the table, white-knuckling his coffee mug and desperately wishing to be anywhere else. But frankly, a lot of my really engaged relatives are too busy to really follow through on this anymore, and I'd hate to go through the whole charade just to determine that we are all in exactly the same positions as before, except all now possessed of uncomfortable knowledge about one another.
Additionally, most of my relatives simply do not care at the moment. However, were they to be dragged into a gross family drama surrounding the gay, their resentment would be magnificent to behold.
So I remain mum. (Mostly.) It's not that bad. But I must admit one thing: it grated my cheese somewhat when one relative, a very sweet person whom I respect a lot and who presumably knows what's up, and who is undoubtably struggling to keep the peace and say the right thing to their touchy dyke relation, referred to my lovely girlfriend as my "roommate."
Alas! My aching heart. How could I have communicated my irrational distress? Of all the words my beloved relative could possibly have chosen to describe my relationship, this was the only one that could have so efficiently reduced it to a by-product of the prevailing socioeconomic situation, yet at the time, there was no way to address this. I writhed. My relative writhed. Everyone was unhappy.
This must never happen again. I shall educate the world.
These are some alternate word choices that I would have found acceptable under the circumstances:
Friend
Lady friend
Special friend
Very special friend
Advanced options include, but are not limited to:
Hetero life partner
Totally straight helpmeet
Platonic paramour
Highly involved cat co-parent
Ironic wife
All of those, I would like to stress, are extra credit.
Perhaps this attention to a very minor detail seems silly when you consider what LGBTs of previous generations went through at family gatherings. That's because it actually is silly. (I have found that most things that really matter to people are silly.) But, luckily, two days out, I'm beginning to see the funny side of being the Christmas lesbian. Like Santa, I bring gifts, gorge myself on cookies, and escape before anyone knows what happened. Like Krampus, I terrify everyone with the possibility that I will be offended.
Really, I have the most fun.
But next year, my family meets my beguiling girlfriend. Frankly, as a woman whose chosen profession is to be nice to people, she's much better equipped to handle a Christmas lesbian situation than I, the aggressive and occasionally paranoid writer-librarian, have ever been. Depending on circumstances, it's possible that she will end up having even more fun than I do. Stay tuned, friends.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Monday, December 23, 2013
On Charity
A woman stopped me in the grocery store today and asked for a ride home. Immediately, I started running down my checklist.
1. Who?
A puffy, middle-aged woman in a somewhat shabby coat, her makeup old, her wallet full of five ones, a five, receipts, various cards, and a ten that she slipped into a side pocket like a street magician with a gold watch. Her ride, a coworker from the toy store, had been shoehorned into a longer shift. She was stuck.
2. What?
A ride home. Just to Salem. In a car that she assumed (or hoped) I had, with the gas she assumed (or hoped) I'd previously pumped, to a place she assumed (or hoped) I knew about. Just a ride, with nobody waiting at the end to take my stuff. Just a quick fifteen-minute hop over to the next town, her and me alone through the dark and slick and chilly streets of the cold Christmas night and its dispassionate police cars moving like unblinking fish among the kelplike lines of the roadway. Just a journey through the night. People never realize how personal that is. Intimate, even. The road at night is a line between a world where you live and a world where your car slips off the road and vanishes. I don't drive around with just anyone.
3. Where?
Salem courthouse - difficult enough to get to at the best of times, this imposing structure is located on a one-way street in the heart of the traffic morass that is downtown Salem. It is also exactly one block from my home. Coincidence chills me much more than purposeful appropriation of my data. Google has my address, but this woman was not Google. Had someone pointed me out? Did she know me? Do I still radiate that special marginal-person vibe that so often accompanies knowledge of courthouse locations? Worst of all - horror of horrors - did she actually live in my neighborhood? Her recently expired drivers' license located her in a town on the other side of the Merrimack Valley. Born 1969. Organ donor. She looked happier in her ID photo.
4. Why?
The busses are gone. She said she had no money for a cab (obviously a lie) and couldn't get money from the bank until the morning (also possibly a lie, considering that her bank and credit cards were in full view.) So as for why, well, I have no idea. I imagine the story is fairly complicated. But at least it probably didn't involve me unconscious in a gutter sans computer, reader, smartphone and mic. The one or two con artists I think I've run into had their stories in very meticulous shape, and their patter and costume were Broadway-ready. In fact, that's how I ended up picking them out. If they were. (They were.)
5. How?
On one hand, I could give her the ride home. But once I'd determined she wasn't a threat, I felt both oddly disappointed and uncomfortably close to her. Without her own knowledge, she was gushing personal details - the newness of her poverty, the emptiness of her left hand, the naiive and ill-advised search for Samaritans. A driver's license without a car. An education without a job. I did not want to know this woman. I did not want the burden of her gratitude and humiliation. I couldn't bring back her greenhouse or assuage her weight fears. I couldn't give her a ride home.
That's how I overran her protests and shoved the bill into her hands and refused her request for my name. That's how I hightailed it like a coward, clenching my teeth until I felt fairly confident that I'd made a clean getaway. That's how I came to write tonight; slightly poorer, not at all a better person, and thankfully bereft of the responsibility that comes with knowing more about someone than they tell you.
Maybe she was a con artist after all.
1. Who?
A puffy, middle-aged woman in a somewhat shabby coat, her makeup old, her wallet full of five ones, a five, receipts, various cards, and a ten that she slipped into a side pocket like a street magician with a gold watch. Her ride, a coworker from the toy store, had been shoehorned into a longer shift. She was stuck.
2. What?
A ride home. Just to Salem. In a car that she assumed (or hoped) I had, with the gas she assumed (or hoped) I'd previously pumped, to a place she assumed (or hoped) I knew about. Just a ride, with nobody waiting at the end to take my stuff. Just a quick fifteen-minute hop over to the next town, her and me alone through the dark and slick and chilly streets of the cold Christmas night and its dispassionate police cars moving like unblinking fish among the kelplike lines of the roadway. Just a journey through the night. People never realize how personal that is. Intimate, even. The road at night is a line between a world where you live and a world where your car slips off the road and vanishes. I don't drive around with just anyone.
3. Where?
Salem courthouse - difficult enough to get to at the best of times, this imposing structure is located on a one-way street in the heart of the traffic morass that is downtown Salem. It is also exactly one block from my home. Coincidence chills me much more than purposeful appropriation of my data. Google has my address, but this woman was not Google. Had someone pointed me out? Did she know me? Do I still radiate that special marginal-person vibe that so often accompanies knowledge of courthouse locations? Worst of all - horror of horrors - did she actually live in my neighborhood? Her recently expired drivers' license located her in a town on the other side of the Merrimack Valley. Born 1969. Organ donor. She looked happier in her ID photo.
4. Why?
The busses are gone. She said she had no money for a cab (obviously a lie) and couldn't get money from the bank until the morning (also possibly a lie, considering that her bank and credit cards were in full view.) So as for why, well, I have no idea. I imagine the story is fairly complicated. But at least it probably didn't involve me unconscious in a gutter sans computer, reader, smartphone and mic. The one or two con artists I think I've run into had their stories in very meticulous shape, and their patter and costume were Broadway-ready. In fact, that's how I ended up picking them out. If they were. (They were.)
5. How?
On one hand, I could give her the ride home. But once I'd determined she wasn't a threat, I felt both oddly disappointed and uncomfortably close to her. Without her own knowledge, she was gushing personal details - the newness of her poverty, the emptiness of her left hand, the naiive and ill-advised search for Samaritans. A driver's license without a car. An education without a job. I did not want to know this woman. I did not want the burden of her gratitude and humiliation. I couldn't bring back her greenhouse or assuage her weight fears. I couldn't give her a ride home.
That's how I overran her protests and shoved the bill into her hands and refused her request for my name. That's how I hightailed it like a coward, clenching my teeth until I felt fairly confident that I'd made a clean getaway. That's how I came to write tonight; slightly poorer, not at all a better person, and thankfully bereft of the responsibility that comes with knowing more about someone than they tell you.
Maybe she was a con artist after all.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
December With Flowers
December came and never left
The birds came back and brought the sun
The flowers shook their manes and roared silently at the baking rocks and unsleeping lizards who didn't care that it was still December.
We walked barefoot in the grass and got ticks.
Some of us took summer jobs as camp counselors, fell in love,
Sunburned through the smell of skin, swam nude, dreamed of snow.
Others began to walk, sometimes together and sometimes in small groups,
Talking quietly about December
And never losing that holiday feeling that comes after the presents are open and before everyone has gone home.
The birds came back and brought the sun
The flowers shook their manes and roared silently at the baking rocks and unsleeping lizards who didn't care that it was still December.
We walked barefoot in the grass and got ticks.
Some of us took summer jobs as camp counselors, fell in love,
Sunburned through the smell of skin, swam nude, dreamed of snow.
Others began to walk, sometimes together and sometimes in small groups,
Talking quietly about December
And never losing that holiday feeling that comes after the presents are open and before everyone has gone home.
Sunday, December 15, 2013
Events of the Present Day
So this past week, two big things happened. First, the radio stations exploded into an unwelcome cacophony of new Christmas music. I mean, I have nothing against new music or against Christmas, but to introduce me to these songs for the space of two weeks before brutally culling them seems cruel. Morally abandoned, even. Like delicate poinsettias, those hothouse Christmas songs don't stand a chance in the cold, incipient January.
The other thing was an acne outbreak. I'm approaching thirty and I still have fairly serious acne. The reason for this is that, for reasons baffling to science and magic alike, I am incapable of processing milk and milk products, including milk chocolate.
I fucking love milk chocolate.
There is no way I'm giving up milk chocolate in the name of beautiful, clear skin that I might - might - get to enjoy for another whole ten years. What would I nosh on without chocolate? Cabbage leaves? Carrots? No. These will not yield the sweet, savory satisfaction, the creamy ecstasy, the mood-soothing magic of the humble yet vauntable chocolate. Upon my honor as an American, as a free woman, as a writer possessed with the emotional intensity of a million suns, I will not relent! May pustules cover my entire face before I relinquish the delectable chocolate pretzels!
Thus, by way of my very own internally generated idiocy, am I regularly mistaken for a sixteen year old boy.
Other stuff happened too. First, my beautiful and talented girlfriend gained admittance to a university of fine repute whose graduate credentials will catapult her to well-deserved greatness! Hooray, my lady! Hooray! Hooray!
Also, I write for this fantastic indie book review magazine, Foreword Reviews. Turns out, they have a quarterly paper edition. Neat! Turns out they also featured my review of the excellent and hilarious Brittle Star by Rod Val Moore in a spotlight. Double neat!
A word about Moore. This guy has some serious talent and deserves attention, because the next thing you know, he'll be teaching your workshop on incorporated satire and you'll find yourself wondering how you never got the man's autograph before he turned into a writer's writer and all that. (Gosh do I wish he had a blog.) I've never read his other book, Igloo Among Palms, but it's high on my list, as is the upcoming Juniper Prize-winning History of Hands. Go read him!
But to conclude, here's some of my other review stuff. Some of it is wonderful, some of it is fabulous, all of it is 100% Product of Anna. I am a veritable fountain of, well, criticism.
God help me when I finally publish something of my own.
The other thing was an acne outbreak. I'm approaching thirty and I still have fairly serious acne. The reason for this is that, for reasons baffling to science and magic alike, I am incapable of processing milk and milk products, including milk chocolate.
I fucking love milk chocolate.
There is no way I'm giving up milk chocolate in the name of beautiful, clear skin that I might - might - get to enjoy for another whole ten years. What would I nosh on without chocolate? Cabbage leaves? Carrots? No. These will not yield the sweet, savory satisfaction, the creamy ecstasy, the mood-soothing magic of the humble yet vauntable chocolate. Upon my honor as an American, as a free woman, as a writer possessed with the emotional intensity of a million suns, I will not relent! May pustules cover my entire face before I relinquish the delectable chocolate pretzels!
Thus, by way of my very own internally generated idiocy, am I regularly mistaken for a sixteen year old boy.
Other stuff happened too. First, my beautiful and talented girlfriend gained admittance to a university of fine repute whose graduate credentials will catapult her to well-deserved greatness! Hooray, my lady! Hooray! Hooray!
Also, I write for this fantastic indie book review magazine, Foreword Reviews. Turns out, they have a quarterly paper edition. Neat! Turns out they also featured my review of the excellent and hilarious Brittle Star by Rod Val Moore in a spotlight. Double neat!
A word about Moore. This guy has some serious talent and deserves attention, because the next thing you know, he'll be teaching your workshop on incorporated satire and you'll find yourself wondering how you never got the man's autograph before he turned into a writer's writer and all that. (Gosh do I wish he had a blog.) I've never read his other book, Igloo Among Palms, but it's high on my list, as is the upcoming Juniper Prize-winning History of Hands. Go read him!
But to conclude, here's some of my other review stuff. Some of it is wonderful, some of it is fabulous, all of it is 100% Product of Anna. I am a veritable fountain of, well, criticism.
God help me when I finally publish something of my own.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Why Zombies?
It is the veritable doorstep of Halloween. I have, once again, begun to blog.
Great news, as they say. My biographer will certainly take note of this momentous re-occasion. That said, it's hard to imagine what they will say. Perhaps something along the lines of the following:
Since Halloween is approaching with neither speed nor subtlety, I feel that it is most appropriate to discuss an aspect of pop culture that has become as bloated and mindless as its very namesake, a plague upon our mentality so lush and rife that, despite its deeply horrific and increasingly gory aspects, even children are aware of it.
I refer, of course, to the modern mainstream zombie.
It began as a worker exploitation scam, of course: workers magicked unto death and buried are reborn as the ultimate wage slave. What a terrifying thought for a colonialist, a worker, a serf! Even in death, you are not free. There are fields to work and a mill of economic progress that must grind ever more wheat with ever greater efficiency, and damned be the stubborn.
It was the robbery by reason of the promise of Heaven. No God could save you from your place in the economic machine. Your mind, the you of YOU, now expanded beyond the edge of the ocean, was the new anathema of the new system of the strong forcing the dispossessed. And they (THEY!) had a new enemy. The enemy of YOU.
Fear
is a squishy beast and can be squeezed into various fun shapes. In the
late sixties, the zombie became Social Problems, the fear that We Are
Not Doing So Good. George Romero began this wave with "Night of the Living Dead" and rides it to this very day.
Then, when we addressed social problems by making their consideration and study fashionable, the zombie became Guilt. Because by that time, there were too many of us doing too much at once. Our sins were no longer simple.
We had so many new fears. Freddy was the fear of bad men and little girls. Ash was the fear of your cowardice in the face of your fucking cowardice, because you have unaddressed insecurities, you coward. Predator was Time coming for you, slowed not an iota by all your education and technology and good grammar and healthy diet. They were all you, all along. And you worked through them and eventually forgot about them.
But things have changed. Now, you seem to be a zombie. Why? Because everybody's a zombie. I'm a zombie. Look at me, starting a blog. What are my expectations? Why do I write? Do I create art or consume bandwidth? It's terrifying. Not knowing is always terrifying. Now not staying dead has eclipsed the actual fear of death.
If we must be afraid of concept zombies, then at least we have the consolation of knowing that our fears have become sophisticated. Socially acceptable. Even fashionable. Zombies give us the power to become fearsome brutes again, (in a fairly clean, recognizable, and attractive way,) despite our framed degrees and clean shoes and manicure appointments at three. I don't mind this concept. If I have to be a menace in the end, then let me at least return to my bestial roots and be frightful like our brutish prehuman ancesters, to take on in death the dignity of an apex predator despite my spoon-fed life of powdered chicken soup.
But time leaves savage nobility in the dust again and again. If I am to believe Time Magazine's Joel Stein and several others, then I am of a particularly feckless and narcissistic recent generation known as millennials. I shun work and worry constantly over minute and nonexistent ailments. Narcissism is my defining characteristic. I create most of my own problems by purchasing overpriced organic food and avoiding exercise. What a bitch am I. Lowly, lowly, sadness, woe. My shame is complete, or something.
Granted, he ends the piece by talking about how millennials are digitally savvy and highly creative and some other made-up arbitrary stuff, but since I'm making stuff up myself right now, I'm not about to blame him for that. Also, plenty of better writers have had smarter stuff to say about Stein's irritating cover story since then. Still, the jibe stings. It makes me feel like biting something.
How I relish the day I join the ravenous twenty-something hordes in assailing the headquarters of Time Magazine. Cold, hard data, my ass. Give me Stein's soft brains any day. I need not work out to be a good zombie. I don't even need a place to live after my undeath - my parents probably wouldn't have me anyway, but more to the point, my landlord would probably try to kill me. Anyway, an apartment is no place for a free-range zombie. And a job? A job? Excuse me, but I didn't go through the entire reanimation process to spend my precious time working instead of spending my time running down the brains that I love. Occupy Zombies!
To put it briefly, millennials love zombies because we are so darn tired of hearing about what lazy assholes we are. Some of us go to fairly exhausting lengths to untooth that stereotype, which of course makes us want to give it bigger fangs. We want what we can't have, et cetera.
Because aren't zombies the perfect despicable young people? To live the terrifying dream as a piece of ultimate resilient networked swarm intelligence, I need not read up on leadership or human resources or C++. There's no reason to put in a few years of time at a job I hate. Zombiehood is monsterdom without all that tedious preparation. It is a release of personal responsibility, a simple, focused, 100% effective pattern ad infinitum, a part in a single whole that is more successful than a plethora of individual human beings over all of human history reliably failing to work together for any reason. It's OK to be obsessed with eating and making more of myself when I am dead. That's the point of being a zombie.
Zombies are better functional humans than the excitable monkeys that go around digging up minerals and pumping weird gasses into the air. The monkeys create stuff and then can't figure out what to do with it. The zombies just consume. They kind of clean up the place, actually. Their only joy is the act of communion turned creation, sex and eating and social sauce all in the same action. They are joyful, these zombies. They've found the magical item we're all looking for on Black Friday: the One Thing That Will Make Us All Happy.
This is why we must defeat zombies again and again in videogames, movies, in ourselves. Zombies are just better. Zombies are already here. The zombie inside us has already won. We just don't know it yet. Think of a way to make yourself better than a zombie - any way at all, really - and you're winning.
Great news, as they say. My biographer will certainly take note of this momentous re-occasion. That said, it's hard to imagine what they will say. Perhaps something along the lines of the following:
"Clearly, this soon-to-be-famous author had not an iota of an idea as to
how, exactly, to begin a blog."
Let us acknowledge the truth of this statement for a moment.
 |
| HEY LOOK EVERYONE, I GOT A BLOG! |
Okay, that's good. Moving on!
Since Halloween is approaching with neither speed nor subtlety, I feel that it is most appropriate to discuss an aspect of pop culture that has become as bloated and mindless as its very namesake, a plague upon our mentality so lush and rife that, despite its deeply horrific and increasingly gory aspects, even children are aware of it.
I refer, of course, to the modern mainstream zombie.
 |
| Pleased to meet you. |
It began as a worker exploitation scam, of course: workers magicked unto death and buried are reborn as the ultimate wage slave. What a terrifying thought for a colonialist, a worker, a serf! Even in death, you are not free. There are fields to work and a mill of economic progress that must grind ever more wheat with ever greater efficiency, and damned be the stubborn.
It was the robbery by reason of the promise of Heaven. No God could save you from your place in the economic machine. Your mind, the you of YOU, now expanded beyond the edge of the ocean, was the new anathema of the new system of the strong forcing the dispossessed. And they (THEY!) had a new enemy. The enemy of YOU.
 |
| Your Soul: not included in the modern economic model |
Then, when we addressed social problems by making their consideration and study fashionable, the zombie became Guilt. Because by that time, there were too many of us doing too much at once. Our sins were no longer simple.
We had so many new fears. Freddy was the fear of bad men and little girls. Ash was the fear of your cowardice in the face of your fucking cowardice, because you have unaddressed insecurities, you coward. Predator was Time coming for you, slowed not an iota by all your education and technology and good grammar and healthy diet. They were all you, all along. And you worked through them and eventually forgot about them.
 |
| Now thay're just cute. |
But things have changed. Now, you seem to be a zombie. Why? Because everybody's a zombie. I'm a zombie. Look at me, starting a blog. What are my expectations? Why do I write? Do I create art or consume bandwidth? It's terrifying. Not knowing is always terrifying. Now not staying dead has eclipsed the actual fear of death.
If we must be afraid of concept zombies, then at least we have the consolation of knowing that our fears have become sophisticated. Socially acceptable. Even fashionable. Zombies give us the power to become fearsome brutes again, (in a fairly clean, recognizable, and attractive way,) despite our framed degrees and clean shoes and manicure appointments at three. I don't mind this concept. If I have to be a menace in the end, then let me at least return to my bestial roots and be frightful like our brutish prehuman ancesters, to take on in death the dignity of an apex predator despite my spoon-fed life of powdered chicken soup.
 |
| Just like the noble cave dwellers once rehydrated. source |
But time leaves savage nobility in the dust again and again. If I am to believe Time Magazine's Joel Stein and several others, then I am of a particularly feckless and narcissistic recent generation known as millennials. I shun work and worry constantly over minute and nonexistent ailments. Narcissism is my defining characteristic. I create most of my own problems by purchasing overpriced organic food and avoiding exercise. What a bitch am I. Lowly, lowly, sadness, woe. My shame is complete, or something.
Granted, he ends the piece by talking about how millennials are digitally savvy and highly creative and some other made-up arbitrary stuff, but since I'm making stuff up myself right now, I'm not about to blame him for that. Also, plenty of better writers have had smarter stuff to say about Stein's irritating cover story since then. Still, the jibe stings. It makes me feel like biting something.
How I relish the day I join the ravenous twenty-something hordes in assailing the headquarters of Time Magazine. Cold, hard data, my ass. Give me Stein's soft brains any day. I need not work out to be a good zombie. I don't even need a place to live after my undeath - my parents probably wouldn't have me anyway, but more to the point, my landlord would probably try to kill me. Anyway, an apartment is no place for a free-range zombie. And a job? A job? Excuse me, but I didn't go through the entire reanimation process to spend my precious time working instead of spending my time running down the brains that I love. Occupy Zombies!
 |
| www.dailymail.co.uk |
To put it briefly, millennials love zombies because we are so darn tired of hearing about what lazy assholes we are. Some of us go to fairly exhausting lengths to untooth that stereotype, which of course makes us want to give it bigger fangs. We want what we can't have, et cetera.
Because aren't zombies the perfect despicable young people? To live the terrifying dream as a piece of ultimate resilient networked swarm intelligence, I need not read up on leadership or human resources or C++. There's no reason to put in a few years of time at a job I hate. Zombiehood is monsterdom without all that tedious preparation. It is a release of personal responsibility, a simple, focused, 100% effective pattern ad infinitum, a part in a single whole that is more successful than a plethora of individual human beings over all of human history reliably failing to work together for any reason. It's OK to be obsessed with eating and making more of myself when I am dead. That's the point of being a zombie.
Zombies are better functional humans than the excitable monkeys that go around digging up minerals and pumping weird gasses into the air. The monkeys create stuff and then can't figure out what to do with it. The zombies just consume. They kind of clean up the place, actually. Their only joy is the act of communion turned creation, sex and eating and social sauce all in the same action. They are joyful, these zombies. They've found the magical item we're all looking for on Black Friday: the One Thing That Will Make Us All Happy.
 |
| by the brilliant randyotter |
This is why we must defeat zombies again and again in videogames, movies, in ourselves. Zombies are just better. Zombies are already here. The zombie inside us has already won. We just don't know it yet. Think of a way to make yourself better than a zombie - any way at all, really - and you're winning.
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