#22: Wuv, twue wuv

Actual updates

All my notes this month are full of excitement, which is funny to me because I’m writing this from my Writer’s Garret of Employment - we’re all waiting for results of COVID tests and working/playing from home, and it isn’t especially thrilling (or productive). The reason behind the test is twofold: first, Hap has a cold or what appears to be a cold, which we have now both caught, and second, we had recently been in contact with a bunch of human beings and it was a good idea to get tested anyway. So no one’s feeling poorly or anything, aside from some garden-variety stuffiness and scratchy throats.

But back to being in contact with human beings - Hap and I went to a wedding! It was two of my most precious and beautiful friends! I am filled with emotions! Hugs! Dancing! A really good signature cocktail! Delicious food! I wore a caftan and looked like a whole tent, who gives a shit! Hap was also the ring bearer and did a great job, even if I had to talk him out of going back up after he had carried up the rings (in a lovely decorative bowl) so as to bring them the empty box that had formerly held the rings. I mean, yes, dude, everyone will laugh, but they are actively exchanging vows right now so perhaps it is not the time??? Part of parenthood is learning when to encourage your kid’s class clown spidey sense and when to teach them to dial it back, I guess. BUT ANYWAY congratulations to the happy couple, at least one of whom allegedly reads this1, I love you, I’m so glad I could celebrate with you, you looked like an actual angel (either one! both! why not!!) and I’m thrilled that you were finally able to get hitched!

In more news of the heart, remember when it was like a week ago or whenever and Elvira came out? In case you missed it or don’t click links or something2, the Mistress of the Dark has been living with a woman for 19 years, and she was with a man before that, so unless I hear otherwise, I believe that claims her for our team3. Moreover, it paves the way for the Halloween costume that none of you had better steal from me, god dammit, I know you and I’ll find out: Elbira. It writes itself, really. Stay tuned.

I don’t want to get all work-excited in here; being all notice me senpai about your own job is embarrassing and inevitably leads to disappointment, but I did have one nice thing happen to me lately in a work context. For a bit of background, I’ve been in a holding pattern for awhile where I wasn’t eligible to take on new projects until I had exceeded certain metrics for a solid year, to prove I wouldn’t fall apart and do a terrible job on everything if I added more responsibilities. And I met that requirement and got to do one neat new thing, which is nearly done, and then a project that I’m very interested in needed an owner. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t making a fool out of myself, so I checked with my manager that I was actually allowed to raise my hand for it. He said yes, but not to get my hopes up since I’m not a sure thing. So, like any normal person being told that, I read that as “don’t bother, you’re not getting it.” Either I was still too risky or they had someone else in mind, I wasn’t sure, but I took the appropriate action in the situation, which was nothing. I didn’t apply (“apply,” the application process was simply expressing interest) and I just tried to put it out of my mind and get on with the rest of what I was doing.

And then my manager messaged me to say the person “hiring” for this role was wondering why I hadn’t applied. I told him. Sorry, wait, this deserves a bold: I told him. Felt fairly proud of myself for that; I was clear and calm about it and kept my shit together, which was a bit of a surprise. He was surprised too - he hadn’t meant it that way, he said, and I (of course!! of course) apologized to him, I mean I’m sure it was really my fault for taking it wrong, I’ll be sure not to leap to the worst possible conclusion in future, etc., you know the deal. Basically negated everything I had just done in terms of standing up and being all cool and capable, but that wasn’t fooling anyone. At any rate, I girded my loins and messaged the person hiring for the job to express interest, and then got asked to put some time on their calendar to talk about it.

I got to the meeting and it was not an informational session, it was not an interview, it was a quick planning and logistics session on how I would get started. Apparently they had a much lower turnout of interest than they had expected. So yes, I got the job! And I think I also got negged, occupationally?4 But I got the job, I’m really pleased about it, I think I might be good at it, and other people seem like they’re excited too. So I guess we’ll see who was right!

Also, quick update, to provide comic relief to your day, here is what happened in mine this morning: I’m at work, having come in on a rainy day against my general inclination (no eating or drinking in the office except on the roof, which has no shelter, so if I can’t sit outside, I can’t e.g. have a cup of tea, which: no). I have a good reason to have come in today: it’s flu shot day at the office and I want to see people. But it’s raining, so when I was walking up the stairs to come out of the T, I put my hood up. This action knocked my earbud out, and since we live in a society that has apparently decided to eschew headphone jacks in phones, it is a wireless one. So it falls down. The T stairs at Central Square have these little rain gutters along the sides of the steps, and as it turns out, if your headphone bounces into one, it gets to have a fun waterslide ride all the way to the bottom, where it splashes into a puddle next to a grating. There’s an opening, but it’s not quite big enough to get my whole hand into. So my left earbud lives there now, and I put part of my hand into a gross T puddle, and this has done nothing to disabuse me of the notion that wireless headphones are a bad idea.

What am I reading

New section! I feel like I frequently have opinions about the stuff I read, and if nothing else this whole newsletter is “well here’s what I think about THAT.” I promise to be scrupulously honest about what I am actually in the middle of, and not skip talking about something because it’s embarrassing, or bad, or a comic book (comic books are books and deserve rights!!).

Naturally, of course, I kick this off while I’m reading something a bit out of character for me: the book by the My Favorite Murder cohosts, which is titled, as you would expect, Stay Sexy and Don’t Get Murdered. This is not a podcast that I listen to. This is not a podcast that particularly sings out to me; Matt listens to it and while he was working from home last year, I’d often hear it while he was working. So I have a bit of a footing in their world but I’m not a murderino by any stretch. There’s a lot about it that doesn’t sit right with me - these are people’s actual lives and deaths they’re having a ball with, and they have had to do, by their own admissions, a lot of learning about everything (and you know how I feel about being publicly wrong about things!). But of course true crime is fascinating, and anyway our friend lent us this book so I decided to give it a shot.

It’s different than I expected! It isn’t about murders at all; it’s more of a memoir about the two cohosts, which, to be fair, it does say right on the cover. And yes it’s quippy and a little obsessed with catch-phrases, but that doesn’t rankle when it’s about their own lives. They’ve got tons of material there, too: they both went through it as young people, and I think they’re just a few years older than me5, so their descriptions of, for instance, living (if you can call it that) through the thinness culture of the 90s rang very true to my own experience. It is a bit didactic about how to get your life in order, as they did, which makes me wonder what the expected audience is for this book. I know their show has a broad listener base, but the book seems like it’s written for people in their early-to-mid-20s who are just sort of figuring it out. There’s also one moment where they want to talk about how to do self-care, and they rule out all the people who live a charmed life and never worry, and also all the dipshits who have not yet realized that they are dipshits, and then, also, depressed people. And then they start the next paragraph with “Now that they’re gone, the real people can get real.” So… got it. The point with depressed people was that this book was not qualified to give a person who has real live capital-D depression useful help, and they should see a pro, which is fair enough, but what’s this “real people” shit? Can’t think of something more likely to kick a depressed person while they’re already down.

So, it has been kind of a mixed bag so far. I’m happy to be wrong about this book in a general sense, but I don’t think it’s going to get me to start listening to the show.

Some links

This is so true but more than that it’s a fascinating look at the artists’ side of this ubiquitous compilation, which I had never really thought about before - of course it was huge for some of these smaller Canadian acts to be on there with, like, Bush (which you’ll see mentioned in the article as “Bush X” - there was already a Canadian band named Bush, so the band you’re thinking of had to alter its name in Canada. I shit you not). Also, the article gets it exactly right that the first two were the best. I still have those; I had bought the third but I gave it away after a couple years, since it really just wasn’t that great. An Oral History of Big Shiny Tunes: the CD That Defined a Canadian Era

This guy clearly grew up playing SimCity 2000, like me, and when he encountered arcologies, thought “I should do that.” Mostly I like this article for the part about the space penises, but I don’t disagree that the idea that some guy should basically invent a capsule society is extremely stupid and bad. Especially when the “some guy” in question is a billionaire; it should come as no surprise to readers of this newsletter that I agree with the statement that no one can become a billionaire ethically; no one earns a billion dollars, etc, so they’re very low on the list of “individual who gets to set up a whole-ass society,” insofar as anyone is on that list at all. A Billionaire Wants to Build a Utopia in the US Desert. Seems Like This Could Go Wrong

Timely, infuriating, the past isn’t even past, I could go on and you already know all the things I could say. They Called Her “the Che Guevara of Abortion Reformers”

Your monthly dose of “headline says it all”: Accused Cannibal Gets Prison Time for Botched Castration in Remote Cabin

How would you like some science about why songs are catchy and get stuck in your head and spread like wildfire? I found it particularly interesting how fans of some genres tend to share songs more vigorously than others. Also, thinking of the songs I included on this issue being 66% gleaned from going through my old tapes, I wonder how the era of making each other mixtapes compared against the current, lower-bar-to-entry atmosphere of sharing tunes. Viral Hit: Why Some Music Is Infectiously Popular 

First of all, I know. I know! That’s the worst word I’ve ever read as well. But second of all… can we not even let our poop be private? Must everything be a tool to track something about us, recommend us things, get us fired, and have someone tell us we’re fat? (you know it’s first and foremost going to be computers telling you you’re fat) The Smart Toilet Era Is Here! Are You Ready to Share Your Analprint with Big Tech?

To this I have nothing more eloquent to say than “holy shit!” Solar “Superflares” Rocked Earth Less Than 10,000 Years Ago—and Could Strike Again

I will die on the hill of “apple picking is a scam of scams,” and that is true and borne out by this article, but this also goes into how frankly WEIRD it is that this activity, which is a miserable, fast-paced, underpaid job when done at scale, is also a Fall Family Photo Moment that yuppies (are there still yuppies?) pay a lot of money to get to do. Apple Picking Is a Bizarre Imitation of Hard Work

Some tunes I’ve been listening to lately

I bet you saw that this was Wipers and assumed it would be “Is This Real,” didn’t you. You did. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it’s a great tune, but this one lodged more firmly in my head.

Tape rediscovery #1: want a sexy tune about hooking up on a train? Sure you do.

Tape rediscovery #2: I actually had a tape of this whole album and while my tapes were sitting in a box, I forgot all about it. I have very much enjoyed rediscovering it.

This month’s top 5: Twitter posts about the Facebook outage, by type

1. whoops I spilled my lunch on the servers

2. have they tried switching it off and back on again?

3. whoever did this is the greatest hero the world has ever known

4. but what if it just stayed gone? wouldn’t that be nice?

5. Zuckerberg lost $7 billion during this outage! hahaha… fuck

Well, I was going to say something zippy about how it’s a good thing this is still up and running when a big swath of the social internet was lights out, but then it got fixed while I was still at work and not able to write. So… I guess… this is still better than Facebook! You won’t get into a bad faith argument with the stepdad of someone you went to high school with here! You’re welcome!