Remember how a few days ago I mentioned being angsty? Yeeeaaaahhh, maybe not the best time to finally look into this Billie Eilish person I’ve been hearing so much about. Or maybe it was exactly the right time? I dunno.
Anyway. Whew! She’s good.
Who?
My daughter has an imaginary friend named “Fighter.” (He’s the pilot for all her favorite cars and Legos and so on.)
Fighter has a sister named “I Forgot.” Yes, that is her actual name. I checked.
Maybe she plays baseball?
Filed under Microblogging, My Life
Unbuff
Lately I’ve had a hard time writing anything other than awful, angsty poetry (don’t ask). It’s like going through high school all over again, except now with kids and debt.
It’s also really eating into the buffer I built up from taking nine days to post a 1,200- word short story I’d already written. I wonder if there’s anything else salvageable on my DeviantArt account…
Filed under Microblogging, My Life
I Tweep for Humanity
- What a Tweerp
- While My Guitar Gently Tweeps
- That’s Twinge
Some of my favorite tweets weren’t my tweets at all, they were conversations between me and my best friend. We were both on Google Buzz–I think we might have been the only ones–so we were able to comment on each other’s posts privately. Here’s a few of our briefer exchanges:
Me: “Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.” -Rod Serling
BFF: But the acoustics are amazing!
Me: So are the sets!
The casting is good too, but the scripts are usually just embarrassing.
Me: Naaails to the left, duct taaape to the right–here I am, stuck in the middle with gluuue~
BFF: You’re describing how I mounted my computer monitor to the wall
To this day I’m not 100% sure he was joking.
Me: If mathematics is the study of pure logic and abstraction, then philosophy is the mathematics of language.
BFF: ?
Me: Could you please be more specific
BFF: ??!
…I have no idea what I was saying, either.
BFF: Anytime I say anything worth quoting, you should attribute it to Mark Twain instead.
Me: -Mark Twain
Like any good hacker, when Mr. Twain learns a new system his first instinct is to try to break it. Sometimes I call him the “anti-mnemonic” because this instinct kicks in without fail any time I’m trying to remember something (No, no, no, it’s “righty light-y, lefty heft-y!”), but he’s expressed the urge in other contexts, too. Such as, for example, lame jokes on Twitter:
Me: I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, there isn’t really any bad news.
BFF: …the bad news is, I was lying about there not really being any bad news.
The other bad news is, I’ve got one more for you. Don’t worry, I’ve saved the most self-indulgent best for last, complete with commentary:
Guess what? Chicken butt.
Ah yes, a classic. But wait, it gets “better!”
Guess why? Chicken pie.
Uh oh. I sense sleep deprivation…
Guess when? Chicken pen.
All right, I think we get it now.
Guess where? Chicken hair.
*sigh*
Guess who? Chicken poo.
I’m surprised I held out that long before resorting to poop, honestly.
Me: Guess how? Chicken cow.
BFF: You are such a menace on Twitter!
-Mark Twain
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.
Filed under Essays
Practicing My Selfies
I think I’m finally getting the hang of it!
Filed under Microblogging, Selfies
Take Care of Yourself
Because you are precious, and should be taken care of.
Filed under Microblogging
Further Tweminiscing
Yesterday was my birthday! To celebrate, I’m going to take a break from all this boring old fiction and get back to something more self-indulgent exciting: tweets I wrote 15 years ago!
A lot of my old tweets were reposts of other people’s blogs, articles, and essays, or sometimes even just quotes. This one is special because the person I’m quoting is my dad:
“Home is where people get your jokes.” -Dan McCrimmon
Love you, dad ❤️
Some of my tweets reminded me of moments and ideas I’d nearly forgotten. Usually this was a good thing.
Watching an…interesting movie called “Tank Girl.” Confused, but in a good way. This must be how dogs feel.
Tank Girl is a cult classic, one of the earlier comic books to be adapted to film. Recommended. I still think “confused, but in a good way” probably is how dogs feel, but after I got stoned for the first time I decided that was a better approximation. (Watching Tank Girl while stoned would be like how dogs feel on the 4th of July.)
Some reminders were more mixed.
Last night I sewed a ripped seam in my pajamas; it was the most accomplished I’ve felt all semester. Why am I in school, again?
Honestly, sometimes I still feel like this is among my top ten achievements in life.
Re-reading papers I wrote in high school. Man, the old me was so awesome. What the hell happened?
Yeah…college did things to me.
Then there were the reminders of things that haven’t changed at all.
Times change, but people remain insane.
Sometimes the insanity is more…prominent…than others.
“Where is my watch?” *searches* “Hmm, that’s odd, I can’t find it any–oh. It’s on my wrist.” #22andgoingsenile
Still just as senile at 37. That’s…good? That’s a good thing, right?
Oh yeah, I was gonna eat dinner at some point. #oops
Oops.
Wall
This post is the final entry in a series. Start from the beginning here.
██.
Once upon a time, there was a beautiful girl. Her hair was red as the sunset, and her laugh was as light and sweet as an echo. The girl lived in a bright and colorful garden with a boy, and the boy was tall and strong as mountains, and his voice was as smooth and bright and clear as running water. The boy showed the girl the tree that grew in the center of his garden, and they laughed and played and made love in its shade, and he helped her pick fragrant blossoms to weave into her hair. And when the night grew dark, the boy led her back into the garden, and drew his arm tight around her, and swore to keep her safe. The girl fell asleep on a bed of flowers, and did not wake while the boy was away, and in the morning she followed him to the comfort of familiar things. From time to time, she would think of that place in the center of the garden, where the tree’s branches grew broad and high, and remember. But she contented herself, and never wondered, and never returned to climb those branches, and look out, over the garden’s walls.
Filed under Fiction
In Search of Secrets 