#57: Big deal

Actual updates

The most exciting thing that’s going on is that we finally completed the bathroom update, which went okay in terms of stress and delays and not being able to take showers, but great in terms of working with a great contractor. If you’ve had to get some work done around your home for any reason, you know how rare and special that is. This guy was so on top of things and so chill and friendly, and even when something went wrong he fixed it on his own dime (and seemed so stressed out about it, which I felt so badly about! Granted he did do the thing, but my god, how many terrible stupid mistakes did I make that same day?).

But yes, things did go wrong. The new toilet arrived with broken parts in the flusher, and when he went back to exchange it, they gave him all kinds of hassle (and then he wound up getting the very last one). The tile took longer to cut than expected and added a day to the process. The floor wasn’t even - it’s an old house¹, that’s expected - so making sure the vanity could stand both flat on the floor and flush with the wall added another few hours. But the real thing was the leak. Wait, that should be in dramatic caps: The Leak.

The Leak! So the bathroom is above the kitchen, as many are, for plumbing consolidation reasons. Indeed, our first worry when we discovered the hole under the bathroom tiles was that if water had gotten down there over time and rotted some boards away, the bathtub might be on the verge of crashing through the kitchen ceiling (this was revealed to not be the case). But one afternoon, as I worked in the dining room and the contractor worked upstairs, he came running down and asked to see me because there had been “a problem.”

I stepped into the kitchen. Water was dripping along lines, now visible in brown, in the ceiling; water was streaming down the wall in one area, water was dripping off the doorframe of the basement stairs. We went down to the basement to shut it off, and water was dripping down the walls there, too. I was kind of freaking out, but I kept a lid on it, because I am if anything not going to be a bitch to someone who is trying to help me. He was freaking out a little too because turning off the water didn’t seem to do anything, but once he discovered that he just had to turn it off more, he felt a lot better and reassured us that our house was not fucked, a brief period of water exposure would not cause the house to rot away and fall over as long as it got to dry out. He worked out that the leak was due to a screw that he had accidentally pierced a hot water pipe with, so he was even able to turn our cold water back on (and without shower access, having hot water was only really important for running the dishwasher). He fixed it himself the next day and didn’t charge us for it; he’ll be back next month to repaint our kitchen ceiling.

It was weird to run into one of the things I was actually afraid of and find it to be unremarkable: water leaking inside the walls does not NECESSARILY mean massive crisis; if you catch it quickly enough, it’s a minor inconvenience. All in all it was likely leaking for just under an hour; couldn’t have been more. It remains to be seen if I will now be less worried about things in general since they could turn out to be much less horrifying than I built them up to be. One counterexample may possibly not be enough.

But anyway, our bathroom looks good now, and is basically guaranteed not to collapse through the kitchen ceiling, and what more can you ask of a bathroom? Well, I guess we COULD have picked the new toilet that promised you could flush a bucket of golf balls down it without it clogging, but since we rarely need to flush buckets of golf balls, we opted for a different model. Hopefully our golf-ball-flushing requirements don’t change up on us and make us regret it!

The only other thing that happened this month that I feel like talking about didn’t even happen to me, which is actually kind of the point.

So, I follow former(?) burlesque performer Femme Brulée’s clothing shop, Sparkletown Studios, online - it’s where I got my glittery “Smash the Patriarchy” shirt that always gets compliments - and she had her shop set up at an event that I thought looked interesting last year. It came around again this year, and she was selling there too: the Fat Pool Party.

This is a party put on by Bigger Bodies Boston, which is an organization for fat liberation and fat community, and I finally started following them - god, that party looked so perfect. So much fat joy. So many people just hanging out, at home in their bodies, in a space that has often been a site of terrible cruelty. Looking at these pictures made me want to grieve for the person I was, trapped in my body by the way everyone directed me to think about it - a feeling some people may find reminiscent of other ways you can be trapped in an identity by other people. You’re told what your body signifies, and it’s never anything good. You’re reminded that value comes from scarcity. You’re shown, over and over again, that you don’t deserve friendship, let alone love, and anyone who lets themselves be seen with you is doing you a favor or messing with you. But this was a picture absolutely devoid of that. I looked at it and experienced something that, if it wasn’t hope, it was a good imitation.

I couldn’t go, for normal reasons, but I’m also pretty sure I couldn’t go. In the sense that I would not fit the rubric². I don’t think anyone would talk to me there; I think I’d get scorned as an interloper trying to feel better about themself by being surrounded by people with even bigger bodies, and that’s not why I want to go at all. I want to feel comfortable and at home and surrounded by community, and it would be nice if this was a place I could find that - but either it wouldn’t be in reality, or I’d be too far into my head about it despite everyone being nice, and they equal out to the same thing.

Anyway. I don’t know what I’m driving at here, other than I wish I could be part of a community in any real way. But that involves participating, whatever community it is, and that’s usually not possible for me (or it’s very limited). It’s why I don’t have a ton of friends anymore! You can see why I would get excited at the prospect. But don’t worry! Reality sets in nearly immediately.

Also, it’s weird to hold this thought simultaneously with the shameful pride I feel in seeing the scale number go down. Especially since it’s going down due to efforts towards saving money - no little treats, no need to buy that snack, eating lunch every other day - and not towards losing weight. For instance, right now we have a lot of leftovers in our fridge. It would actually be MORE wasteful not to eat them, since they’d go bad and that’s throwing away the money we spent on ingredients. But after a couple months of this, my brain has gotten into the old patterns, and is trying to throw up reasons why I should still keep to the schedule and not eat lunch. No, dummy! That’s not the point! And it should never have been the point!

What am I reading

I’m super behind on this too - last week I did not open a book for several days in a row, which makes me feel like dying - but at the moment, at the MOMENT it’s Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, by Jamie Loftus.

It is about hot dogs. She takes a cross-country road trip to try the various hot dogs of the nation, and in and of itself, that’s worth reading (and her writing is worth reading on any subject). But it is also about gentrification and capitalism, the police state, history, people she would bang (some of the most ordinary-looking dudes in the world), riding in a car driven by someone who increasingly hates you, and whether or not Brockton, MA sucks (verdict: yes [complimentary]). You should read it immediately. I don’t care if you eat meat or hot dogs specifically at all, it’s worth your time regardless. Maybe one day I’ll get an uninterrupted half hour and will be able to finish the damn thing.

Some links

This sounds batshit insane, and trust me, it absolutely is. If a person didn’t create the thing, and in the case of AI, a person unequivocally did not³, then who owns it legally? The answer, to clickbait you a little, may surprise you. How AI Copyright Law is Being Guided by Spirits from Atlantis

This headline is kind of a word salad, but the facts of the article are cool as hell. Man, I love space. Scientists Find a Molecule Never Before Found Outside Our Solar System on a Planet with Glass Rain

I love space part 2: the part that makes you furious about all the women erased from the annals of science!! Still, black holes remain amazing. Glad she’s getting her due in some small way at last. The Woman Who Discovered Black Holes

On “outing” athletes posthumously as… well, it depends on who and in what period, but as trans or intersex or having this or that genetic condition. A thoughtful piece that isn’t just “did you know that this old-timey athlete was a MAN???” but goes into whether or not we should even look into this at all when someone is dead and can’t agree to it (and they preferred to keep it quiet during their lives). What Can We Learn from the Biology of Dead Athletes?

Speaking of gender, but moving from the realm of the real to the realm of the video games - I was completely unfamiliar with Birdo before reading this, and in case you are too, she is a Nintendo character who has been around for a long time; her gender, or how her gender was talked about, has shifted around a lot over time, and it even varies based on which language the game is presented in. Is she the first trans video game character? Sort of. A Complete History of Birdo’s Gender

Ok, the headline is funny (poop! they’re awash in it! awash!!) but it’s actually a really interesting look at how two different countries manage the fact that they share both a border and the results of their sewage outflow. The California Beach Town Awash in Poop

If you’ve ever thought that books by authors of this or that race or ethnicity all seem to look the same as each other, you are not wrong!! Infuriating! Also insulting to the general reading public - I don’t need the author’s race spelled out for me in order to decide whether I’m going to like the book!⁴ The Hidden Racism of Book Cover Design

Climate change vs. ketchup! Ketchup is a subpar condiment, yes, its usefulness is limited to fries, given, but it’s still another indicator of what the climate blowing up means to agriculture and therefore to how we eat food. Record Heat is Testing Kraft Heinz’s Efforts to Climate-Proof Its Ketchup

On the other hand, this is hopeful, and also kind of wild! Imagine a heap of discarded orange peels stretching to the horizon, for starters. But it didn’t stay that way! How 12,000 Tonnes of Dumped Orange Peel Grew Into a Landscape Nobody Expected to Find

This article is about Kenya, but today as I edit this, I’ve just heard about the horrifying murder of Ugandan marathoner Rebecca Cheptegei, by her boyfriend. It’s a small community at the elite level, like anything is; I’m sure many of the people quoted in this article knew Cheptegei well and are grieving today. Why Kenya Produces So Many World-Class Marathoners

I can’t imagine this is surprising, writ large, but the specifics are pretty interesting. It’s certainly made me approach deciding on flavors with a more critical eye (that sounds snobby too but I just mean, am I trying to contrast or highlight here). How Snobbery Helped Take the Spice Out of European Cooking

This piece is from the Paris Review, which caused me to misread before clicking the link when I first saw it - I thought this was going to be about a bigfoot conference in Paris, which sounds very insane in the best way. Alas, it’s in Florida, which makes somewhat more sense (although I think of bigfoot as an exclusively PNW guy, I am wrong about that). At the Great Florida Bigfoot Conference

I do not live in the UK, so this is the first time I’ve heard of this most-infamous murder. I don’t know if the conviction was wrongful or not, but I can say that there is plenty here to suspect multiple people for. Did the UK’s Most Infamous Family Massacre End in a Wrongful Conviction?

This is a remembrance of being on the Titanic, from a woman who was the longest-lived survivor, and it doesn’t break new ground but it’s always worth reading a personal account. It is a little jarring to read it in a college magazine, though, because they put the graduation dates at the end of each alumna’s name, without intervening punctuation, like her name includes the date, but if you can get past that, it’s worth your time. The Longest Night

You are not imagining it! They keep renaming the roll sizes as being double, quadruple, super duper mega multi roll, and putting less and less paper on them. Why Toilet Paper Keeps Getting Smaller and Smaller

Speaking of bad consumer experiences! This is so annoying, and even if it worked well (i.e., if the stores were staffed well enough that there would be someone available to open the case when you needed it, which is not the case), it’s something I never ever want to do - and I don’t even have crippling social anxiety! I just don’t need the guy who works at the CVS to hover over me while I pick out shampoo or whatever! I don’t need to you know I’m buying some kind of rash ointment!⁵ I will always simply not buy the thing if that’s my only option. Retailers Locked Up Their Products - and Broke Shopping in America

A bunch of people started experiencing oddly similar, and oddly odd, neurological symptoms in New Brunswick. But figuring out the cause wasn’t just a medical mystery, but a political one as well. They All Got Mysterious Brain Diseases. They’re Fighting to Learn Why

Okay, I feel like two… maybe two and a half of these are “iconic” in the sense that they are known outside of the fans of that particular band, but surely there are more. I haven’t decided yet what I would have included if I had made this list, because this newsletter is egregiously late and I don’t have time, but I want to know what you would have included yourself. The Stories Behind Six Iconic Album Cover Shots Taken in America - and Where to Recreate Them

I flopped pretty hard on this test, getting 7/12. Since I stopped sleeping full nights at a time, I barely ever remember a dream. I’m sure this is fine!!!! How Much Do You Know About Your Dreams?

This makes me want to have written more cryptic postcards back when I was a kid going on family vacations and writing to my friends, instead of the world’s chattiest missives that could fit on the back of a card. No one would ever call my postcards “mysterious.” See a Mysterious Postcard That Was Delivered 121 Years Late

What are you doing right now? Wouldn’t you rather be sitting at a folding table on an Italian beach eating some home-cooked food with every member of your family (blood or chosen)? Well so would Italians! But unfortunately, businesses are making that difficult!! Italians Fight for the Right to Feast on the Beach

Not being on TikTok means these two rich people are totally unknown to me. In case they’re unknown to you, they are a nonagenarian diamond heiress and her decades-younger spouse, who is mainly famous for being famous (and for being genderfluid before it was often seen in a famous person). It sounds like it will be heartwarming but I regret to inform you that it very much is not. The Twisted True Love Story of Lady Betty Grafstein and José Castelo Branco

Imagine having a chunk of ancient city wall sitting in your living room. See the Historic Ruins Hidden Inside Everyday Buildings in Athens

Further in antiquity news: Discover the Hidden History of Tomb Robbing in Ancient Egypt

This article is pretty interesting to read on the heels of what might be our one remaining monoculture watch, namely the Olympics. After GoT, the media landscape hasn’t recaptured that same “everyone’s watching it, so everyone’s got to be writing about it” with anything else really. But an international sporting event comes close - especially when people want to talk about more than just the results of the competitions (which I do. sports-gossip with me). What Game of Thrones Did to the Media 

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

Some Instagram post had this set as the background music, and I didn’t even have the sound on (because I’m not a psychopath, who wants your phone to start playing music suddenly while you’re just scrolling through a feed) but simply seeing the title put the song in my head for two days.

Another one where it was stuck in my head for days, but this time it was because one of the counselors at Hap’s summer camp was named… Rudy. I annoyed Hap by suggesting he sing this at the guy.

Whereas this one, I’m not even sure if I actually heard it OR saw reference to it somewhere, but I thought of it and it got stuck in my head for a few days… and then just now when I played it to consider whether to include it on this issue and it got stuck in my head for half the afternoon and counting.

This month’s top 5: SUMMER Olympic sports I could do (badly)

Ok, when the Olympics was still on, I threw the challenge out at work: if you were absolutely required to compete in any Olympic sport, which one would you pick, but I’m going to be stricter with myself here and keep it to the summer Olympics, which are not my forte (my pick for the work thread was one of the ski racing disciplines, in which I would come in extremely last but which I could also do without dying). Herewith.

1. Ping pong. I’d be bad at it, obviously, since I’m bad even for a standard human, but if you lose at this sport you just… lose. You aren’t also in danger of your life.

2. Two doughty Canadians won the hammer throw, and as I am also a doughty Canadian, maybe it … runs in the… family? Never mind that I could never figure out the footwork whenever we had to do any throwing sports like that in gym class.

3. Speaking of things that run in the family, one story my mom has told me is about how when she was a kid, she went to this JCC summer camp that each kid’s parent would also come to, and the parents each taught a class there. While the other moms were teaching things like arts and crafts or maybe a little swimming, my Grandma Fran, who worked at the perfume counter in a department store, taught: archery. So who’s to say, maybe there are some archery genes swimming around in my DNA (I have never tried it).

4. Now we’re in the “kind of a reach” section of the list. Trampoline is one of the events that Canada always does well in⁶, for some reason, and I feel like I could bounce around pretty good? They have those ultra-springy trampolines, an order of magnitude bouncier than the one your friend had in their back yard when you were a kid, and, also unlike that one, you’re allowed to do flips on these. Could I do a flip? I mean, no, but in this thought exercise you’re allowed to be terrible at the sport. The only flaw here is that if you land wrong you might actually die, but you buys the ticket and you takes the ride, right?

5. I could lose really badly at swimming, I guess? In the sense that I know how to swim, won’t drown, and will just come in about an hour later than all the rest of the competitors. In that sense, I guess I could just lose really badly at a running event too, but I don’t really need to revisit the humiliations of gym class. I’d rather be totally embarrassed in the pool than on the track.

You know what I wouldn’t do? I wouldn’t decide it was fine if I sucked ass at breaking, set myself up as the head of the national governing body of the sport, and keep talented competitors out so that I could win the Olympic spot. Just an idea about a thing I would not personally decide to do!!!

Ok, once I’m done this newsletter (which will not be right away! weekends and vacations are destroying any ability I might have to work on it!), I have finally figured out how to finish the story I was working on, so I’ll have that to do next (or, rather, how to get from where I am now to the ending I have in mind). I think this one might be good? But I’ve been wrong before!

_{1 well, not by New England’s standards - built 1900 - but for some places, that would count as old!}

_{2 i’m fat! everyone who knows me would agree (or would at least try to wiggle out of saying so because they think it’s an insult, while still agreeing in their heart), but there’s a variety of different body shapes under the fat umbrella, and i’m relatively privileged among them, and so i don’t want to steal fat valor, so to speak}

_{3 if you’re inclined to come in here arguing with me about that, please save yourself the time and aggravation and just turn around and leave now. it’s a plagiarism machine that torches the planet so that people who think they deserve creativity can pretend they have some}

_{4 what i need to know in order to determine if i’ll like the book is: how gay is it}

_{5 i’m not, by the way!! don’t put in the newspaper that i have a rash}

_{6 as a nation, we’re just… bouncy, i guess?}