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Who I’d Bite If I Were a Zombie
Look, nobody likes a bitter jackass, although all of us have had run-ins with mean people at one point or other. Some experiences stick with a person, however, and even if one’s outlook is generally positive, well, a little rumination on justice is probably okay. In this spirit I take up the idea of zombifying my history’s greatest offenders. I invite others to do the same!
Robert B., former landlord during my second year of graduate school: Robert’s main problem was that he was a slumlord who just couldn’t admit it. He owned a dozen or so dilapidated, once-proud brick apartment buildings in Syracuse, New York and despite not wanting to ever maintain the structures, thought that tenants should pay current luxury apartment rates for the honor of residing there. When I pointed out that my living room ceiling was starting to bow, he asked me not to stand under there any more. And when a 6-foot section of that ceiling, no longer able to hold onto the rotten joist, collapsed seconds after I ran out of the room, he sued me, saying I’d done the damage myself. So yes, I would bite this guy on his dominant hand so he could watch himself turn putrid before he became a blathering zombie.
Wendy B., former college roommate: Wendy was a great friend that I met during my brief stint in the Campus Crusade for Christ. Although she claimed she didn’t believe in anything they were preaching, she also wasn’t cool with it when I started to come out of the closet. I came home from class one day to find my elderly cat locked in a kitchen cabinet, traumatized and covered in his own excrement. She refused to admit she’d done this to him, but that’s the problem with living with only one other person. Two weeks later, she moved out, calling me all manner of homophobic names, and four weeks later, I learned she was in a relationship with another woman. So Wendy, I have a zombie bite with your name on it.
Road Rage Guy in Alexandria, Virginia: All I did was stop at an amber light, and this creep followed me for ten more blocks, ranting at me from the wheel of his Jeep. When I got out of my car in a parking lot (I was headed for a haircut), he parked one row over and then screamed that I was a freak of nature. Geez, I know I needed a haircut, quit it already! His roundhouse punch may have been obvious and easy to stop, but this guy seems better off as a rambling undead than free to roam the suburbs of Washington, DC.
Mitt Romney, current candidate for President: No, he hasn’t injured me personally, but honestly, I see this more as a public service to improve his communication skills, because yes, Mitt has all of the panache of a wet bag of dog poop. At least eking out “braiiiiiins” would keep him away from his gaffes about $10,000 bets and how little he pays in taxes.
Actually, four people in 41 years is a pretty non-bitter list, all things considered. That said, I’d love to see other folks’ nominees for this little ignoble award. Feel free to add in the comments section!
Obsessed: GOP Men with Women’s Reproduction
Rick Santorum sticks around like a sexually transmitted infection. As the Washington Post put it earlier today, while Mitt Romney has trouble connecting with audiences on the stump, Santorum’s message is frighteningly clear: he wants a United States of Christ. Or at least, his interpretation of what that would look like. I can see the cows coming home, and Santorum still hasn’t mentioned any of the Beatitudes. Apparently he’s given up on inheriting the earth.
Santorum’s Web site claims that he will “lead us from the front,” but in reality it sounds like he wants to lead from the uterus. Not his uterus, since he doesn’t have one, but any garden variety uterus from a random woman in America.
Once upon a time, the fight for abortion rights and reproductive health was fought over the terms of when, abstractly, a human life begins. That abstraction is now being pushed into legislative agendas and bills, in the form of “Personhood” laws that would make pregnancy termination by any means—even, horrifyingly enough, miscarriage—a crime on par with homicide. Read More…
All the Details Fit to Print
Prospective or emerging writers place so much emphasis on landing an agent or publisher that we may forget there’s a whole lot to do after the contract is signed. Rather than sitting back and waiting for my 5-star reviews to come in and my phone to ring off the hook (not that my phone even has a hook anymore), I’m working hard on getting my literary ducks lined in a row. I’ve created a press kit, gotten head shots, staged a fake interview so I have a Q&A to give to bloggers and readers, talked to the cover designer, lined up some reading gigs, and asked a few author friends for blurbs or to be part of the blog tour. And there are still more items to consider here.
What’s the ISBN? Are there advance reader copies available, because some reviewing organizations have a 3-to-4 month lead time or won’t run a review after the publication date. What’s the expected price of the hardcover or paperback? Will it be available in Canada? The UK? Which ebook readers is your publisher working with for the title? Read More…
My Kid and His Invisible Chrysalis
The baby has made it clear he’s in a new growth spurt. Far from having an amazing lexicon or masterful charades skills, he just screams and eats a lot, and then one of the parents in the room will run to the interwebs and look up the under-12-months milestones for development. Not the sitting up, rolling over, crawling development, but the non-cognitive stuff like tooth appearance and those aforementioned spurts. Emile’s week 6 and month 3 spurts came a little early, so it’s not surprising we’d see the sixth month dash at 5.5 months. It has me wondering if he’ll grow into an impatient pain in the ass, but then I remind myself that it’s just too soon to tell.
I picked him up yesterday morning and had the sensation that someone had photoshopped my live child to make him 3 percent larger than the night before. His head, hands, shoulders, all of him seemed to take up more space and weigh more. I remembered that the further we are from the core of the planet, the less gravity pulls on us, so I briefly considered taking him to the top of Mt. McKinley and hoping he’d be easier to hold there. Probably the pool at the local YMCA was an easier way to get to the same outcome, however. He’s still about a month away from being allowed into the baby swim class. Read More…
The Terrain of Bumbling
There’s a little less than a month now until the release of my memoir, Bumbling into Body Hair: Adventures of an Accident-Prone Transsexual. I’d rather keep it simple and just be excited, but that isn’t my DNA. Instead I’ve got anxiety up the wazoo and I find myself curtailed by disappointing fantasies of weak sales, offended reviews, and a whole lot of ho-hum regarding the writing. It would be one thing to keep my expectations low, but I enjoy flirting with the border of self-torture. Before anyone begins commenting that it’s all going to be okay, please know that I understand these are just as implausible outcomes as landing in a soft chair on the Ellen DeGeneres Show. If nothing else, I’m accustomed to my own neuroses. So in an attempt to foil my weaknesses, I’m writing today about the issues brought up in my memoir. Call it a teaser of sorts. Read More…
Send in the Clowns Who Claim to Protect Marriage
UPDATE: The petition drive in question is now for Referendum 74, not 73. Washington’s Office of the Secretary of State sent out a correction this week.
Signed, sealed, and delivered–that is the status of same-sex marriage in Washington State, as of 11:30 this morning. And now that a Republican legislator’s impassioned support of marriage equality has gone viral (from Walla Walla’s district, no less!), it’s time to rest easy, basking in the warm glow of justice…
Oh, wait. There’s no time to relax. A mere three hours after Governor Gregoire signed marriage equality into law, the NOM people were filing Referendum 73 in Olympia to revoke the law with a ballot initiative.
Who and what is NOM, you ask? Welcome to the awful new world in carpetbagging. Read More…
The Persistence of Lies
I’ve devolved as a news-watcher over the last 25 years. If I waited until the evening to get the news, during dinner with my parents in the late 1980s, I hardly ever see broadcast news now. The promise of American 24-hour news channels never came to pass, in my opinion; instead of thorough coverage from news desks around the world, it’s mind-numbing commentary from uninformed talking heads who seem much more interested in their own product placement contracts than in communicating about our global goings on. Those news syndicates and news desks in other countries have dried up, but what was their other option after years of little funding or support from the channel executives? Now big name news outlets like CNN use amateur video–even solicit it openly–to serve as content providers. So it is that people’s backyards were frequent film footage sources during every large snow of the winter last year.
The GOP primary race has put me over the edge, though. On top of the sensationalized headlines, anemic interest stories, vapid policy analysis, and over-reliance on technology gimmicks (I’m looking at you, hologram interview), now there are countless stupid sound bites from what looks like little more than well funded bigots running to disassemble the Office of the President. Read More…
The Metaphor Translations: Androids Among Us
I’ve been fascinated by the concept of the humanoid robot, or android, as long as I’ve been reading science fiction, and fortunately there are loads of examples out there for people who find themselves fascinated by such things. Although at first it may seem like androids make a simple statement about our humanity—or lack thereof—I think there are different ways that androids play into a commentary on our species. And in terms of narrative, they’re characters, sometimes even the protagonist, they’ve been used as themes, reflections, and on occasion are the plot itself. So with a fondness for the non-carbon community, let’s look at some messages in popular culture that come from how androids have been conceptualized. Read More…
Pitch Preparedness for Writers
Let me come right out and admit that I have a terrible track record when it comes to making pitches at conferences. At least, I’m not so good at selecting the right agent for my four-minute sit-down appointment. Cherry Weiner waved me away with one stroke like she was a cynical fairy godmother and I was a wanna be frog prince. Or more specifically, a frog.
But then lo and behold, I had great pitch conversations on the fly, when I hadn’t been prepping and when I wasn’t trying to impress. Which leads me to today’s post—if you’re a person who works best fully prepared and working from some memorized text, these bullet points of advice probably aren’t up your alley. On the other hand, nothing read, nothing gained. Read More…
The Sudden Pink War: Making Sense of the Komen/Planned Parenthood Rift
By now, chances are you’ve seen the news that the Susan G. Komen Foundation defunded its support of Planned Parenthood, which it had established in 2005. Pressure for the foundation to stop the support began almost immediately, and the national Susan G. Komen board resisted this pressure until yesterday. I spoke with Gina Popovic, Executive Vice President of the Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho, who stressed that Komen is not the bad actor in all of this, the anti-choice activists are.
“We don’t want a pink on pink war,” said Ms. Popovic.
One of the first thoughts to cross my mind when I read the headline on the Washington Post about Komen’s PP defunding was the completely inaccurate statement that Senator John Kyl made last April:
Everybody goes to clinics, to hospitals, to doctors, and so on. Some people go to Planned Parenthood. But you don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does. Read More…
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