Category Archives: Essays

July 30, 2025 · 8:32 am

SECRET CRUSH

We’ve been cleaning out our old storage unit lately, which means I’ve been rediscovering a lot of memorabilia and souvenirs (and baby clothes, and broken toys, and expired toiletries, and homework assignments from 20 years ago, and literal garbage…)

As you can imagine, there have been a few nostalgia bombs.

One of the treasures I uncovered is from high school, when I had a positively brobdingnagian crush that I was too much of a weenie to do anything about. For some reason, it was very important to me that no one ever find out who my SECRET CRUSH was–or, indeed, that I had a SECRET CRUSH at all. I wouldn’t even write their name down!

Well, except for one time. You see, I had this idea that since I couldn’t talk to them (I mean literally: I had trouble saying a single word to them even though we had all the same friends), I would confess my feelings in a letter.

Now, if you’re thinking that I wrote my SECRET CRUSH a mash note with the intent of doing something normal like, I don’t know, giving it to them–well, you better buckle up, ’cause the weenie train hasn’t even left the station.

Actually giving my crush the letter? Way too scary. I just thought it would be nice to have it written out, so I would know what I would write if I was brave enough. So I wrote the letter and then just kept it in my journal…right?

Ha!

You see, the thought of actually writing the letter I would hypothetically give to my crush if I was brave enough…was still too scary. So instead, I drew a sketch of the letter.

That’s right, folks: I drew a picture of a hypothetical love letter. It’s now hypothetical twice.

(Hold your applause, please: we’re just coming to the best part!)

What did the letter say, you ask? BEHOLD:

(It’s a deadname. Get it???)

I…I can’t, you guys. I’m dying. This is so sad it’s hilarious. I drew a sketch of the hypothetical love letter I would write if I was brave enough to write the letter I would hypothetically give to my crush if I was brave enough to give it to them, and in that sketch…the letter’s blank. I couldn’t even imagine imagining what I would imagine saying to them!

Well, okay, it wasn’t entirely blank: I did put their name on it. I was brave enough to do that much, at least!

…I just had to then immediately tear the page out of my journal, fold it up, put it in a SECRET box, and stash the SECRET box in a SECRET hiding place in my room, so that no one would ever, ever find out about my SUPER SECRET CRUSH.

Especially my crush.

(We ended up married, by the way. I did get there eventually!)

Leave a comment

Filed under Essays, My Life

Tagged as , , ,

July 26, 2025 · 8:52 am

BwEoTrTsEeR

I’m still not very good at poetry, but I feel like I’ve been improving a lot recently!

Or at least I did, before I started reading Andrea Gibson. Now I feel like everything I’ve ever written, poetry or otherwise, is literal garbage. The garbage-est kind of garbage. Like, toilet paper.

Gently used toilet paper.

But…I’m still proud of the progress I’m making? If anything, I’m more motivated than ever to improve. Somehow, seeing a creator that far above my level is discouraging and inspiring at the same time.

It’s like looking across a massive canyon, a chasm that separates my ability from theirs. Surveying it, I can’t pretend perfectionism any more; every word I put onto the page is another reminder of my failure. But the flip side of seeing that gap–remembering it’s there–is that I also know it can be crossed. Andrea themself was on this side, once; they stood where I stand. If they made the journey, maybe I can too.

And of course, there are other reasons why it’s healthy to be reminded that you’re always making garbage.

Leave a comment

Filed under Essays, Microblogging

Tagged as , , , ,

July 25, 2025 · 7:41 am

Attachmentality

When I was little, my best friend was a boy named Jack. We were thick as thieves from 1st grade all the way through 5th, when he transferred to a different school. I haven’t seen or spoken with him since then–almost 30 years–but if I ran into him in the grocery store tomorrow my first impulse would be to give him a big, warm hug.

It recently occured to me that this probably isn’t normal.

I get very attached to the people I like. If I really like someone, I don’t stop feeling close just because we’ve gone a measly little decade or three without speaking–if we get in touch again, I go right back to treating them like a best friend.

Understandably, this can be off-putting to people who no longer feel the same way!

It’s incredible how many background variables our minds take for granted. If it had ever consciously occured to me to question this assumption, I would have discarded it immediately. But because I never noticed the assumption, I continued to take it as given that people I was still attached to would have some attachment to me.

It also helps explain why I struggle with casual relationships with people like coworkers, neighbors, and acquaintances: it’s hard for me to remain engaged and friendly without a strong emotional connection, but building that connection takes a lot of work and can only be done with certain people. I used to be better at this–probably because I had more energy to devote to maintaining the appearance of an emotional connection, even when I didn’t really feel one.* Or perhaps I was better at building small, temporary connections that weren’t as big an investment. Or maybe both! After all, when it comes to certain mental traits (like confidence or friendliness), sometimes “fake it till you make it” is really just another way of saying “practice makes perfect” or “exercise makes you stronger.”

I guess one takeaway for me is that I’m out of practice at being friendly. Better start exercising!

*Not that I didn’t care about the people I was talking to! I care a lot about everybody! In a way, that’s kind of the problem!

Leave a comment

Filed under Essays

Tagged as , ,

July 24, 2025 · 8:13 am

Please, Please, PLEASE Don’t Do This

Elon Musk announces Grok AI's new "Companions" feature on Twitter. Threads users davidleavitt and kevin_michael_murphy_jr mock the feature and Elon, calling him "lonely."

Please don’t use “lonely” to mock and insult people. No, not even N*zis. Companionship is a fundamental human need, right along with food, water, shelter, and safety. When people steryotype “loneliness” as a defining feature of disgusting incels, they alienate potential allies and push vulnerable people who are genuinely suffering into the arms of a toxic culture that exploits their suffering to perpetuate misogyny, classism, and white supremacy.

“Lonely” is not a character flaw and shouldn’t be used as an insult. If you wouldn’t use “autistic” or “triggered” or “sexless” or “depressed” as an insult, don’t use “lonely” as one either. None of those things make a person good or bad!

“N*zi,” on the other hand, is a character flaw. That one’s a great insult! “Incel” is pretty good, too! Just stick with those, please!

Leave a comment

Filed under Essays, Microblogging

Tagged as

July 19, 2025 · 7:09 am

Snow Koan

The master spoke: “It is said the sentence ‘snow is white’ is true, if and only if snow is white. This we have already discussed. But it is a separate question whether snow is, in fact, white. So what color is snow?”

The student, having re-learned the child’s art of giving simple answers to simple questions, replied: “White, of course!”

The master smiled. “Oh? And are you certain of that belief?”

“As you’ve taught me, I cannot be absolutely certain of anything,” said the student. “But I am humanly certain, yes.”

“And if I say that snow is not white?” inquired the master.

“Holding to true beliefs in the face of authority is an old lesson, master. My answer is unchanged.”

“Well and good,” said the master. “But what if I offered more than mere authority?  What if I showed you that snow is not white?”

This question did not seem simple, so the student paused to think before answering.

“If you could actually do that,” they replied, “I would be very interested. But I do not expect it to happen.”

Wordlessly, the master rose and walked outside, beckoning the student to follow. It was winter, and it just so happened that a fresh layer of snow had covered the ground the night before. The master pointed to a patch of snow down the hill, upon which some animal had recently urinated. “Snow is yellow,” the master said, for the snow there was indeed yellow.

The student began to speak, but the master held up a hand to silence them, then led them to a snow fort some of the younger adepts had built that morning.  The two of them stuck their heads inside, and the master said, “Snow is blue,” for the light shining through the walls was, in fact, a muted blue.

Finally, the master pulled a microscope from their pocket and, using a chilled pair of tweezers, placed a single perfect snowflake under the lens, beckoning the student to look. The student did so and beheld a fantastic crystal, transparent yet scintillating with rainbow. The master said, “Snow is all colors and no color,” and surely that was the only description that properly fit.

“Now you have seen,” said the master, “So I ask you again, what color is snow?”

The student, feeling rather stupid, hesitated. They began: “Well…it depends on how you see it, I suppose…or where you see it…I mean, the context–” but they were interrupted by a big, white, wet, and very cold snowball to the face, which the master had been concealing.

In that moment, the student was enlightened.

Leave a comment

Filed under Essays, Fiction

Tagged as , , , ,

June 28, 2025 · 7:43 am

My Truck Identifies As a Prius

It’s a bumper sticker I see now and then. Funny, right? Ha ha, let’s all laugh at the idea that your “identity” can change what’s under the hood.

Only…what if what’s under the hood actually was a Prius engine? Would it be such a stretch then to say your truck ought to be treated like one? That you should be entitled to the same tax breaks and emissions exemptions and parking privileges as any other hybrid?

You might be thinking, “Sure, but people aren’t cars–you can’t just swap parts between them the way you could an engine or suspension!” And it’s true, people aren’t cars: men and women are much more similar to each other than trucks and cars. Unlike them, we aren’t designed and built from the top-down, we’re grown from the bottom-up. We all start from the same two cells, and we all spend the first few days and weeks of our lives looking pretty much the same. Even our genitals are all identical at first! In fact, there are a number of ways male and female “parts” can get mixed up at all stages of development.

Some “mix-ups” are so small as to be barely noticeable: a woman with unusually high testosterone levels or muscle tone, or a man with wider-than-average hips. Others are harder or impossible to ignore: a woman with facial hair, a man with breasts.

Even the venerated “sex chromosomes” are not definitive: there are XY people who can conceive and give birth, and XX people with penises and functional sperm. Not to mention all the other possible karyotypes such as XXY, Xo, XYY, and more.

Given everything that can get “mixed-up” and all the different ways in which a person might not fit the “male” or “female” archetypes, is it really that much of a stretch to suppose that a person might be born with a typically male body, but a female mind? (Or vice versa?)

There is one other important way that cars and people are different: if you claimed that your truck had a Prius engine, we could open the hood and check. But, for better and worse, we can’t simply pop open the hood of someone’s mind and see what’s in there. With rare and limited exceptions, when someone makes a claim about their own mind, we have no ethical choice but to take their word for it.

Identity is complex. Not all of it is determined by biology; there are parts of your identity that you can choose. But being trans, like being gay, doesn’t seem to be one of them. Without exception, every trans person I’ve heard talk about it has described realizing they were trans as a discovery, not a decision: looking back on their past and seeing that they had, in fact, been trans the whole time.

If you’d owned a truck for years that was underpowered but strangely quiet and fuel-efficient, and one day you opened the hood for the first time and discovered it had a hybrid engine… Well, maybe that bumper sticker wouldn’t seem like such a joke anymore.

Leave a comment

Filed under Essays

Tagged as ,

June 13, 2025 · 11:01 pm

One Artist’s Trash Is the Same Artist’s Treasure

If you’ve been checking my blog regularly (hi, mom!) you may have noticed that I’ve been trying to post something every day. As a terminal perfectionist, this is really hard! Why? Because when you make a lot of something–no matter how talented you are–most of it will be garbage.

Not everything I write gets published, of course, and there’s revision and editing, too. But that’s just the teeth of the trap: the perfect excuse to put off publishing until I feel it’s “good enough.”

Sometimes I have to work really hard to remind myself that this is a mistake.

My recent post “Better Than Perfect” explored the idea that ugliness is better than perfection, because perfection isn’t real. That’s true, but it’s not the whole truth: ugliness isn’t merely a compromise between (unreal) perfection and (real) beauty, it’s an unavoidable part of the process. There are no roads to greatness that don’t pass through acres of garbage.

The first time I realized this was in high school. For my birthday, a friend of mine gave me a gorgeous leather-bound journal. It was so nice I felt obligated to fill it up with something, so I decided I’d start a habit of writing in it every day.

Sure enough, nearly all of it was garbage–noticeably worse than anything I’d previously written, even though I’d been practicing for years. But, because I wanted to actually fill up the journal rather than merely write in it, I’d set myself the condition that going back and revising things I’d already written didn’t count–only new entries qualified. So instead of trying to improve the trash, as I normally would have, I was forced to move on.

It was challenging, and trying to come up with something new and good every day didn’t get any easier over time. But after a few months of daily writing, I noticed something curious: although the quality of my garbage didn’t seem to be improving at all, the things I wrote that did turn out good were getting better.

Not just a little bit better. They were much, much better. The best things I’d ever written!

It didn’t last forever. Once I’d met my original goal and filled the journal, I tried to keep the habit with a new one. But I was busy with college by then, and by the end of the day sometimes I could hardly keep my eyes open long enough to scrawl some nonsensical drivel and turn out the light. I started making excuses–still writing new things, but giving myself some slack when I was too tired to make them good. It was a perfectly valid excuse! But excuses for laziness have a nasty tendency of becoming habits. I started giving myself more and more slack–and wouldn’t you know it, my writing stopped improving.

After I graduated, the same pattern repeated with this very blog. At first, I committed to posting something at least once a week, and as long as I did my writing improved. As before, the majority of my writing was mediocre at best. But the posts I was proudest of at the time are, by and large, still posts I’m proud of today (even though the style of those old posts seems terribly juvenile and pretentious to me now). But eventually, I stopped holding myself to a schedule, and my blog gradually fizzled and died.

The moral? Well, I could draw the moral that sticking to a schedule helps me improve–and that’s true!–but it would be missing the broader lesson. The reason keeping to a schedule helps is because it forces me to make trash.

I’ve always been a planner, more comfortable with imagination than reality. My instinct is to avoid the risk of committing to something that might be wrong, or ugly, or embarrassing. But in doing so, I’m throwing away priceless treasure: the practice–in both senses of the word–that is the only road to improvement. If you want to make yourself (or the world!) better, you have to make garbage.

Precious, precious garbage.

P.S. Ironically, this post turned out to be an example of its own message: it’s too wordy, it rambles, the pacing’s all over the place, and I don’t think I got the message across as clearly as I could have. But I have to post something today, so…it will have to do!

Leave a comment

Filed under Essays

Tagged as ,

May 21, 2025 · 6:26 pm

Let Them Play Sports

Let’s say we were talking to one of the people opposed to trans women in sports, and we asked them this: “What about cheerleading? Should trans women be allowed to do that?” Assuming they didn’t just respond with “no, trans cheerleaders would be fine” (ha!), do you think they’d bother to come up with a different excuse, or would they just continue to stick with the “athleticism advantage” hogwash?

Of course I understand cheerleaders compete too, and surely it takes athleticism to support your squadmates on your shoulders or throw them into the air to do backflips or what have you, but (bearing in mind I don’t actually know anything about the subject) I would expect cheerleading routines to be judged primarily by things like coordination, teamwork, energy, and choreography, with athleticism being a minor or secondary factor.

Not that it matters, of course. We already know that no matter what hypothetical we presented them with, no matter how far-fetched the excuse, they’d come up with something. They feel, consciously or unconsciously, that trans people are scary, disgusting, and wrong, and that is their bottom line. Everything else is rationalization, a way to feel morally superior, telling themselves they’re defending women’s rights while in fact doing the exact opposite. As others have pointed out, if any of these people actually cared about women’s sports, they would be talking about any of the many, many difficulties female athletes actually face. Being outcompeted by trans women isn’t one of them.

Leave a comment

Filed under Essays

Tagged as , ,

April 16, 2025 · 11:43 pm

Microblogging

When my youngest child was about two, I turned off all my phone’s Facebook notifications. Back then Twitter was still bearable, so I lingered there a little while, but it didn’t take long for me to quit social media entirely.

It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, but there are some things I miss. The biggest and most obvious was staying up to date on the lives of people I hadn’t seen in years but still cared about, but I also missed the writing. A tweet is definitely not an essay, but the process of writing both is remarkably similar. And just like with my essays, sharing my little thoughts, jokes, ideas, and meditations publicly was much more fulfilling than keeping them inside my head, even when the audience was small.

Writing an essay may be similar to writing a tweet, but it is also a whole lot more work. Crafting a good essay was often a weeks- or even months-long process, and after having kids I simply didn’t have the time or spoons to keep at it. For a while I was still able to write smaller things through social media, but that was one of the things I had to give up when I quit.

Recently I was going through some of my old tweets and Facebook status updates, and I noted wistfully that many of them were quite good and that I missed writing them. That’s when I finally realized what should have been obvious years ago. I’d been thinking I couldn’t write tweets anymore because I’m not on Twitter, but a blog post can just as easily be 140 characters as 1400 words, can’t it? (Did you know I have a blog? You should check it out!)

I won’t be microblogging exclusively. Now that the kids are in school and becoming more self-sufficient, I’ve had more energy to devote to the big ideas, too. But as a way of dipping my toes back into the water I think tweet-length blog posts will be a great way to start.

One last note: I’ve disabled comments for now. I remember moderating and replying to them to be far too much like social media–lots of investment for very small or rare returns, yet addictive enough that it’s easy to spend hours on. If you want to comment or reply to something I’ve written, I encourage you to put something about it on your own site! (Even if your site is just your Facebook page or YouTube channel.) Pingbacks are still enabled, so I’ll likely see it.

To everyone taking the time to read this, thank you. See you out there.

Leave a comment

Filed under Essays, Microblogging, My Life

Tagged as ,

October 19, 2015 · 12:11 pm

Blame Capitalism!

Someone else has something I want. How can I get it?

Capitalism has received a great deal of criticism, from its invention to the present day. It has been blamed by one group or another for seemingly every human evil, real or imagined, including depression, imperialism, violence, hedonism, the decline of democracy, and the destruction of the environment. Especially for the poor, the disadvantaged, and the empathetic, the common refrain seems to be “blame capitalism!” Yet blindly criticizing a policy or view is not at all the same as thinking carefully about it. It’s easy to forget that governments, organizations and policies are tools just as much as hammers and plows, despite their larger scale–in fact, that very scale makes it important to pay extra attention, especially with policies as widespread and influential as capitalism. This means considering such tools’ benefits as well as their evils, while remembering that there is not likely to be a “magic bullet” solution. Poverty, depression, antagonism and the environment are all important problems–but is capitalism really responsible? Or is it possible that true capitalist practice might actually help solve some of these issues?

Continue reading →

8 Comments

Filed under Essays

Tagged as , , , ,